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Mohammed and Mohammedanism 



LECTURES 



DELIVERED AT THE 



ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN 



IN 



FEBRUARY and MARCH 1874 



R^ BOSWORTH SMITH, M.A. 

M 

ASSISTANT-MASTER IN HARROW SCHOOL 
LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD 



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LONDON 
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 

1874 



AH risJits reserved 






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NULLIUS NON LABORIS PARTICIPI, 
HUJUSCE PR^SERTIM OPUSCULI INSTIGATRICI ET ADMINISTRA". 

STUDIORUM COMMUNITATIS 
HAS, QUALESCUNQUE SINT, PRIMITIAS 

D E D I C O. 



PREFACE. 



The substance of these Lectures was written 
early in 1872 : they were originally intended 
only for a select audience of friends at Harrow, 
but on the suggestion of some of those who 
heard them they were afterwards considerably 
enlarged, and were delivered before the Royal 
Institution of Great Britain in the months of 
February and March 1874. 

They are an attempt, however Imperfect, 
within a narrow compass, but, it is hoped, from 
a somewhat comprehensive and independent 
point of view, to render justice to what was great 
in Mohammed's character, and to what has been 
ofood In Mohammed's influence on the world. To 
original Oriental research they lay no claim, nor 
indeed to much originality at all ; perhaps the 



viii PREFACE 

subject hardly now admits of It: but, thanks to 
the numerous translations of the Koran into 
European languages, and to the great works of 
Oriental scholars, such as Caussin de Perceval, 
Sprenger, Muir, and Deutsch, the materials for 
forming an impartial judgment of the Prophet 
of Arabia are within the reach of any earnest 
student of the Science of Religion, and of all who 
care, as those who have ever studied Moham- 
med's character must care, for the deeper 
problems of the human soul. 

The value of the estimate formed of the 
influence of Mohammedanism on the world at 
large must, of course, depend upon such a 
modicum of general historical knowledge, and 
such Catholic sympathies, as the writer has been 
able, amidst other pressing duties, to bring to 
his work. The only qualification he would 
venture to claim for himself in the matter is that 
of a sympathetic interest in his subject, and of a 
conscientious desire first to divest himself of all 
preconceived ideas, and then by a careful study 
of the Koran itself, and afterwards of its best 
expounders, to arrive as nearly as may be at the 
truth. How vast is the interval between his 



PREFACE ix 

wishes and his performance the author knoAvs 
full well, and any one who has ever been fairly 
fascinated with a great subject, will know also ; 
foi; he will have felt that to have the will is not 
always to have the power, and that the framing 
of an ideal implies the consciousness of failure 
to attain to it. 

A Christian who retains that paramount 
allegiance to Christianity which is his birthright, 
and yet attempts, without favour and without 
prejudice, to portray another religion, is inevita- 
bly exposed to misconstruction. In the study of 
his subject he will have been struck sometimes 
by the extraordinary resemblance between his 
own creed and another, sometimes by the sharp- 
ness of the contrast; and, in order to avoid those 
misrepresentations, which are, unfortunately, 
never so common as where they ought to be 
unknown, in the discussion of religious ques- 
tions, — he will be tempted, in filling in the 
portrait, to project his own personal predilec- 
tions on the canvas, and to bring the differences 
into full relief, while he leaves the resemblances 
in shadow. And yet a comparison between 



X PRE FA CE 

two systems, if it is to have any fruitful results, 
if its object is to unite rather than divide, if, in 
short, it is to be of the spirit of the Founder of 
Christianity, must, in matters of religion above 
all, be based on what is common to both. There 
is, in the human race, in spite of their manifold 
diversities, a good deal of human nature ; enough, 
at all events, to entitle us to assume that the 
Founders of any two religious systems which 
have had a great and continued hold upon a 
large part of mankind must have had many 
points of contact. Accordingly, in comparing, 
as he has done to some extent, the founder of 
Islam with the Founder of Christianity — a 
comparison which, if it were not expressed, 
would always be implied — the author of these 
Lectures has thought it right mainly to dwell 
on that aspect of the character of Christ, which, 
being admitted by Mussulmans as well as Chris- 
tians, by foes as well as friends, may possibly 
serve as a basis, if not for an ultimate agreement, 
at all events for an agreement to differ from 
one another upon terms of greater S3^mpathy 
and forbearance, of understanding and of 
respect. 



PREFACE xi 

That Islam will ever give way to Christianity 
in the East, however much we may desire it, 
and whatever good would result to the world, 
it is difficult to believe ; but it is certain that 
Mohammedans may learn much from Chris- 
tians and yet remain Mohammedans, and that 
Christians have something at least to learn 
from Mohammedans, which will make them 
not less but more Christian than they were 
before. If we would conquer Nature, we must 
first obey her ; and the Fourth Lecture is an 
attempt to show, from a full recognition of the 
facts of Nature underlying both religions — of the 
points of difference as well as of resemblance — 
that Mohammedanism, if it can never become 
actually one with Christianity, may yet, by a 
process of mutual approximation and mutual 
understanding, prove its best ally. In other 
words, the author believes that there is a unity 
above and beyond that unity of Christendom 
which, properly understood, all earnest Chris- 
tians so much desire ; a unity which rests upon 
the belief that ' the children of one Father may 
worship Him under different names ;' that they 
may be influenced by one spirit, even though 



xii PRE FA CE 



they know it not ; that they may all have one 
hope, even if they have not one faith. 

Harrow: April 15, 1873. 



I have to return my best thanks to my friend 
Mr. Arthur Watson, for a careful revision of 
my manuscript, and for several valuable suggestions. 

It may be serviceable to English readers to men- 
tion the more accessible works upon the subject, 
to the writers of which I desire here to express my 
general obligations, over and above the acknowledg- 
ment, in the text, wherever I am conscious of them, 
of special debts. I am the more anxious to do this 
fully here, as, while I am quite aware that I could not 
have written on this subject at all without making 
their labours the basis of mine, I have yet In the 
exercise of my own judgment been often obliged to 
criticise their reasonings and their conclusions. I can 
only hope that even where I have ventured to express 
a somewhat vehement dissent from my authorities, 
they will kindly credit me with something at least of the 
verecunde dissentio, which becomes a learner, and of 
the zeal for truth, or for his Idea of It, which becomes 
a writer, however diffident of himself, on a great 
subject. 



PREFACE xiii 

*The Koran,' translated by Sale, with an elaborate Intro- 
duction and full Notes drawn from the Arabic Commentators 

(1734). 

' The Koran/ translated by Savary (1782), also with instruc- 
tive explanatory Notes. 

*The Koran,' translated by Rodwell (1861) : the Suras ar- 
ranged, as far as possible, chronologically. 



V 



Gagnier's 'Vie de Mahomet' (1732) ; drawn chiefly from 
Abul Feda and the Sonna. 

Gibbon's ' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; ' Chapters 
L., LI., LI I. (1788). A most masterly and complete picture. 
■^' Weil's 'Mohamed der Prophet' (1845). Able and to the point. 
V Caussin de Perceval's 'Essaisur I'Histoire des Arabes,' &c. 
. (1847) gives particularly full information upon the obscure sub- 
ject of early Arabian history, and is written from an absolutely 
neutral point of view. 

Sprenger's 'Life of Mohammad,' Allahabad, 1851; and his 
•^ greater work, ' Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohamad' (185 1- 
1861), the most exhaustive, original, and learned of all, but by 
no means the most impartial ; he is often, as I shall point out, 
on one or two occasions, in the notes, flagrantly unfair to 
Mohammed. 

Sir William Muir's 'Life of Mahomet' (185 8-1 861). Learned 
and comprehensive, able and fair ; though its scientific value is 
somewhat impaired by theological assumptions as to the nature 
of inspiration, and by the introduction of a personal Ahriman, 
which, while it is self-contradictory in its supposed operation, 
seems to me only to create new difficulties, instead of solving 
old ones. 

'The Talmud,* an article in the ' Quarterly Review' (October, 
1867) ; * Islam,' an article in the ' Quarterly Review' (October, 
1869) ; both full of most recondite Eastern learning. Had the 
lamented author lived to finish the work he shadowed forth 
in the last of these, he would probably have drawn a juster and 



xiv PREFACE 

more vivid picture of Islam as a whole than has ever yet been 
given to the world. 



For less elaborate works : — 

Ockley's * History of the Saracens from 632-705.' Pictu- 
resque; dealing largely in romance (1708-1718). 

Hallam's ' Middle Ages/ Chapter VI. (18 18); Milman's ' Latin 
Christianity/ Book IV., Chapters I. and II. (1857) ; both good 
samples of the high merits of each as an historian. 

Carlyle's ^Hero as Prophet' (1846). Most stimulating. 

Washington Irving's ^ Life of Mahomet' (1849). The work 
of a novelist, but strangely divested of all romance. 

Lecture by Dean Stanley in his 'Eastern Church' (1862). 
Has the peculiar charm of all the author's writings. Catholic in 
its sympathies, and suggestive, as well from his treatment of the 
subject as from the place the author assigns to it on the 
borders of, if not within, the Eastern Church itself. 

Barth^lemy St.-Hilaire's * Mahomet et le Koran' (1865), a 
comprehensive and very useful review of most of what has been 
written on the subject. 



On the general subject of Comparative Religion : — 

' Religions of the World/ by F. D. Maurice (1846). Perhaps 
of all his writings the one which best shows us the character 
and mind of the man. 

' Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse,' by Renan (1858). Ingenious 
and fascinating, but not always, nor indeed often, convincing. 
X '■ Les Religions et les Philosophies dans FAsie Centrale/ by 

Gobineau (1866), gives the best account extant of Babyism in 
Persia. 

'Chips from a German Workshop' (1868), and 'Introduc- 
tion to the Science of Religion' (1873), by Max Miiller. Un- 
fortunately the author says very little about Mohammedanism, 
but from him I have derived some very valuable suggestions as 



PREFACE XV 

to the general treatment of the subject. Perhaps it is well that 
the extraordinary learning and genius of Mr. Max Miiller should 
be given mainly to subjects which are less within the reach of 
ordinary European students than is Islam^ but it is impossible 
not to wish that he may some day give the world a 'Chip' or 
two on the Religion of Mohammed. 



For books which throw light on the specialities of Moham- 
medanism in different countries : — 

Al-Makkari's ' History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in 
Spain ' (Eng. Trans.). 

Sir John Malcolm's '■ History of Persia/ 1815. 

Condi's ' History of the Dominion of the Arabs in Spain ' 
(1820-21). 

Crawfurd's ' Indian Archipelago' (1820). 

Colonel Briggs' ' Rise of the Mohammedan Power in India/ 
translated from the Persian of Ferishta (1829). 

Sir Stamford Raffles' 'History of Java' (2nd edition), (1830). 

Burckhardt's 'Travels in Arabia' (1829). 

Caille's ' Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo/ 1830. 

Burckhardt's 'Notes on the Bedouins and Wah-Habees' 

(1831). 

Lane's ' Modern Egyptians ' (1836). 

Burton's 'Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina' (1856). 

Barth's 'Travels in Central Africa' (1857). 

Waltz's 'Anthropologic der Naturvolker' (Leipsig, i860). 

Lane's ' Notes to his Translation of the Thousand and One 

Nights ' (new edition, edited by E. S. Poole, 1865). 

Elphinstone's ' History of India'" (3rd edition), (1866). 

Palgrave's 'Arabia' (1867). 

V ^ Our Indian Mussulmans,' by W. W. Hunter (1871). 

Burton's 'Zanzibar' (1872). 

Shaw's ' High Tartary, Yarkaad, and Kashgar' (1871). 

Palgrave's 'Essays on Eastern Subjects' (1872). 

'Report of the General Missionary Conference at Allahabad' 

(1873). 



xvi PRE FA CE 

Three Articles in Periodical Literature, besides 'Islam' men- 
tioned above, are of very high merit, and have furnished me, 
in enlarging my work, with some matter for reflection or criti- 
cism: — 

* Mahomet,' 'National Review' (July 1858). 

* The Great Arabian,' 'National Review' (October rS6i). 
' Mahomet,' ' British Quarterly Review ' (January 1872). 



Among other works which I regret I have not been able to 
consult may be mentioned: — 

Gerock's ' Versuch einer Darstellung der Christologie des 
Koran' (Homburg, 1839). 

Freeman's ' Lectures on the History and Conquests of the 
Saracens ' (1856). 
vX Geiger's ' Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume auf- 

genommen ? ' 
-^ Noldeke's 'Gescbichte des Qorans.' 

* Essays on the Life of Mohamnjed and subjects subsidiary 
thereto,' by Syed Ahmed Khan Bahador, 1870. 

' A Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of 
Mohammed,' by Syed Ameer Ali Moulla (1873). 

The last two books I had not heard of when 
I wrote the substance of these Lectures ; and in en- 
larging my work, I have purposely abstained from 
consulting them, as I have been given to understand 
that from a Mohammedan point of view they ad- 
vocate something of the spirit, and arrive at some of 
the results, which it had been my object to urge from 
the Christian stand-point. I would not, of course, 
venture to compare my own imperfect work, derived 
as it is in the main from the study of books in the 



PREFACE xvii 

European languages, and from reflection upon the 
materials they supply, with works drawn, as I pre- 
sume, directly from the fountain-head. But if the 
starting-points be different, and the routes entirely 
independent of each other, and yet there turns out 
to be a similarity in the results arrived at, possibly 
each may feel greater confidence that there is some- 
thing of value in his conclusions. 



CONTENTS. 



-«o«- 



- LECTURE I. ■ 

Introductory. 

Comparative Religion. — Historical Religions of the world moral in 
their origin, not theological. — ^Judaism — Buddhism — Christianity, — 
Religion in Greece — Question of originality of Mohammedanism. — 
Two views of Religion. — Obscurity of all origins, above all of Religion 
— Dim knowledge of Founders of other Religions — Full knowledge of 
Mohammed. — Bible and Koran contrasted. — Difficult in other creeds 
to distinguish the foundation from the superstructure; possible in 
Islam. — Problems connected with Mohammed's character, — Sm"vey of 
the Saracen Conquests, and of what Mohammedanism overthrew. — 
Its position nov/ — is it losing or gaining ground ? — China — East Indian 
Archipelago — Africa — Extraordinary success of its missionaries there 
now. — Its progress in the African continent traced historically. — 
What it has done for Africa, and what Christians have done. — Its 
probable future in Africa. — Armenia and Koordistan, Revival there, 
— Inc^ia ; few, if any. Converts to Christianity. — Causes ordinarily 
suggested for its success reviewed. — National and Religious prejudices 
stand in way of a fair judgment. — Principles which must guide 
investigation. — Do Religions differ in kind ? — Sacred Books and 
their influence. — Missionary work; its limits and legitimate objects. — 
Can the world be Christianised? .... page i 

LECTURE LL 

Mohammed. 

History of Opinions about Mohammed : — the Troubadours — the Middle 
Ages — the Reformers — Biblical Commentators — Gagnier — Sale — 
Gibbon — Carlyle — other modern writers. — Arabia before Mohammed 
— its Religions — its social condition — War — Poetry — Plunder — 



XX CONTENTS 

Chivalry. — Could Mohammedanism have been predicted? — Was it 
the voice of the spirit of the time, or of individual Religious Genius ? 
— Moral and National upheaval — pre-Mohammedans. — Youth of 
Mohammed — his call to be Prophet and its phenomena— his long 
struggles. — The Hegirah— Sincerity of Mohammed examined — his 
personal characteristics — The Prophetic office. — Mohammed's life at 
Medina — his faults — his supposed moral declension examined — was he 
consistent? — Did he use the Koran for his private purposes? — Illustra- 
tions — the exact nature and limits of his mission — ^Illustrations — his 
death page 56 



- LECTURE III. 

Mohammedanism. 

Essence of Mohammedanism — claims to be universal — how far borrowed 
from Jews, —Judaism and Christianity as known to Arabs. — Mission 
of Mohammed. — Other Articles of Faith — Practical duties enjoined — 
Pilgrimage, its use and abuse — How far alien to Mohammedanism and 
to Christianity. — The Kaaba — the Hadj. — Dictum of Dr. Deutsch. — 
The Talmud and its influence. — Mohammed's concessions to the 
Jews, and his efforts to gain them over. — Why he failed. — The 
Koran — its characteristics — its history — influence — variety — poetry. — 
Relation of Mohammed to Miracles, compared with that of Christ. — 
The Miraculous generally, — Fatalism. — What the Koran says. — 
Opposite effects of the same doctrine — Mohammed's views of Prayer, 
Predestination, and Free Will. — Wars of Islam — an essential par 
of the system or not? — how accounted for. — Connection of the 
Spiritual and Temporal Power — in Eastern Christendom — in Western 
Christendom — and in Islam. — Character of early Mohammedan Wars 
— Religious enthusiasm — the Crusades. — Results of Mohammedan 
conquests — Literature — Science — and Civilization. — Attitude of 
Christianity and Christians towards Religious wars — Morality of war. 
— What wars are Christian ..... page 105 

LECTURE IV. 

Mohammedanism and Christianity. 

The Future Life of Mohammedanism — of other Religions. — Use 
Mohammed made of Heaven and Hell — their legitimate use. — Does 



CONTENTS ' xxi 

Mohammedanism encourage self-indulgence ? — ^Morality of Moham- 
medanism. — Mohammed's attitude towards existing institutions com- 
pared with that of other Founders — Solon — Moses — Christ, — How 
he dealt with Polygamy, Slavery, the Poor, and the Orphan — with 
the lower animals — with moral offences. — How ought Christianity 
to regard Mohammedanism? — How does it ? — Three Monotheistic 
creeds — Heroes common to all — Spirituality of each. — Mohammed 
and Moses compared. — Iconoclasm. — Reverence for Christ — three 
reasons suggested for Mohammed's rejection of Christianity. — Moham- 
med's views of Christ — of the Virgin Mary — of the Trinity — of the 
Crucifixion — of God. — Lessons to be learnt from them, — Has Moham- 
medanism kept back the East by hindering the spread of Christianity ? 
— Is it a curse or blessing to the world at large? — Limits of 
Mohammedanism and of Christianity. — Aspects of Mohammedanism 
in different countries — Africa — Persia — India — Turkey — Spain. — 
Contrast between Christianity and Mohammedanism and their 
founders. — Is the East progressive or not? — Corruptions of Moham- 
medanism — illustrated by other Religions, — Necessity of Revival in all 
Religions — Wahhabees in Arabia and India — Revival in Eastern 
Anatolia, — Limits to the influence of the West on the East. — Des- 
potism — Polygamy — Slavery — the Slave Trade — Is Mohammedanism 
reconcilable with the highest Civilization? — with Christianity? — 
Modifications possible or necessary. — Mohammed's place in History, 

PAGE 162 

Appendix to Lecture 1 241 

Appendix to Lecture HI 249 



LECTURES 



DELIVERED AT THE 



ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN 



IN 



FEBRUARY and MARCH I874 



LECTUEE I. 



Delivered at the Royal Institution, 
February 14, 1874. 



INTRODUCTORY. 

Sua cuique genti religio est, nostra nobis. — Cicero. 

'A/W eV rravTi iSvn u (pojSovfjievcg aiTov, koI Ipya^ofxevog SiKaicavvriVy 
dsKTcQ avr<^ tan. — St. PETER. 

The Science of Comparative Religion Is still In its 
infancy ; and if there Is one danger more than 
another against which It should be on Its guard, It Is 
that of hasty and ill-considered generalisation. Hasty 
generalisation is the besetting temptation of all young 
Sciences; may I not say of Science in general .'* They 
are in too great a hurry to justify their existence by 
arriving at results which may be generally intelligible 
instead of waiting patiently till the result shapes 
itself from the premises ; as if, In the pursuit of truth, 
the chase was not always worth more than the game 

B 



2 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

and the process itself more than the result ! Theory- 
has, it is true, its advantages, even in a young Science, 
in the way of suggesting a definite line which enquiry 
may take. A brilliant hypothesis formed, not by 
random guess work, but by the trained imagination of 
the man of Science, or by the true divination of 
genius, enlarges the horizon of the student whom the 
limits of the human faculties themselves drive to be a 
specialist, but who is apt to become too much so. It 
throws a flood of light upon a field of knowledge 
which was before, perhaps, half in shadow, bringing 
out each object in its relative place, and in its true 
proportions ; finally, it gathers scattered facts into 
one focus, and explaining them provisionally by a 
single law, it makes an appeal to the fancy, which 
must react on the other mental powers, and be a most 
powerful stimulus to further research. In truth, much 
that is now demonstrated fact was once hypothesis, 
and would never have been demonstrated unless it had 
been first assumed. But since there are few Keplers 
in the world — men ready to sacrifice, without hesita- 
tion, a hypothesis that had seemed to explain the 
universe, and become, as it were, a part of them- 
selves, the moment that the facts seem to require 
it — great circumspection will always be needed lest 
the facts may be made to bend to the theory, instead 
of its being modified to meet them. 



ORIGIN OF RELIGION, MORAL 3 

Bearing this caution in mind, we may, perhaps, 
think that the Science of Comparative Religion, young 
as it is, has yet been in existence long enough to enable 
us to lay it down, at all events provisionally, as a general 
law, that all the great religions of the world, the com- 
mencement of which has not been immemorial, co- 
eval that is with the human mind itself, have been in 
the first instance moral rather than theological ; they 
have been called into existence to meet social and 
national needs ; they have raised man gradually to- 
wards God, rather than brought down God at once to 
man. 

Judaism, for instance, sprang into existence at the 

moment when the Israelites passed, and because they 

passed, from the Patriarchal to the Political life, when 

from slavery they emerged into freedom, when they 

ceased to be a family, and became a nation. * I am 

the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the 

land of Egypt, and out of the house of bondage.' 

The Moral Law which followed, the Theocracy itself, 

was the outcome of this fundamental fact. The 

nation that God has chosen, nay, that He has called 

into existence, is to keep His laws and to be His 

people. Consequently, all law to the ancient Hebrew 

was alike Divine, whether written, as he believed, by 

the finger of God on two tables, or whether applied 

by the civil magistrate to the special cases brought 

B 2 



4 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

before him. Moral and political offences are thus 
offences against God, and the ideas of crime and sin 
are identical alike in fact and in thought. 

Again, take a glance at the religion of Buddha. We 
speak of Buddhism, and are apt to think of it chiefly 
as a body of doctrine, drawn up over two thousand 
years ago, and at this day professed by four hundred 
and fifty millions of human beings ; and we wonder, 
as well we may, how a siunmiim bomnn of mere pain- 
lessness in this world, and practically, and to the 
ordinary mind, of total extinction when this world 
is over, can have satisf5.ed the spiritual cravings of 
Buddha's contemporaries ; and, in its various forms, 
can now be the life guidance of a third of the human 
race. But we forget that, in its origin at least, 
Buddhism was more of a social than of a religious 
reformation. It was an attack upon that web of 
priestcraft which Brahmanism had woven round the 
whole frame-work of Indian society.^ It was the 
levelling of caste distinctions, the sight of a * man born 
to be a king ' throwing off his royal dignity, sweeping 
away the sacerdotal mummeries which he had himself 
tested, and found unfruitful, preferring poverty to 
riches, and Sudras to Brahmans. It was Buddha's 

^ See Max Miiller's ' Chips from a German Workshop/ vol. I., 
210-226, especially p. 220; andSpence Hardy's ' Legends and Theories 
of the Buddhists,' Introduction, p. 13-20. Cf. also Beal's 'Buddhist 
Pilgrims,' Introduction, p. 49, seq. 



JUDAISM AND BUDDHISM 5 

overpowering sense of the miseries of sin, his dim 
yearnings after a better Hfe, his moral system of 
which the sum is Love, whicli wrought upon the 
hearts of his hearers. ^ He founded, it is true, a new 
rehgion, but he began by attacking an old.' He re- 
constructed society first, and it was his social reform 
that led to his religion, rather than his religion which 
involved his social reconstruction. The half we may, 
perhaps, think would have been more than the vv^hole — 

• Qusesivit coelo lucem ingemuitque reperta.' 

Nor is it much otherwise with Christianity itself. 
Christ Avas before all things the Founder of a new 
Society ; not, it is true, of a political Society : had it 
been so, more of His countr^-men would have seen in 
his person the Messiah that was to come, and in His 
kingdom the golden age of their own poets and 
prophets. The political frame-work, indeed, of the 
w^orld Christ came neither to destroy, nor to recon- 
struct, except indirectly and remotely. He recognised 
the logic of facts ; above all, the tremendous logic of 
the Roman Empire. Tribute was to be paid to 
Caesar, even though that Caesar was a Tiberius. The 
new Society was potentially a world-wide one, a vast 
democracy in which Jew and Roman, slave and free- 
man, rich and poor were on a footing of absolute 
equality. Enthusiastic love to Christ Himself, evi- 



6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

denced by purity of heart, by forgetfulness of self, and 
by enthusiastic love to all mankind, was the one con- 
dition and the one test of membership. 

It is true, that to this new Creation of His, Christ 
gives a name, which we are accustomed to look upon 
as conveying mainly theological ideas ; He calls it 
^ the Kingdom of Heaven,' but how does He explain 
the term Himself? His great precursor, John the 
Baptist, had predicted its immediate advent. Christ 
says. It is here already, it is zvithin you. At 
the very opening of His work. He speaks of it as 
already existing ; the outline was there, even if the 
details were not filled in. Now if the Kingdom of 
Heaven existed before it had dawned, even upon the 
most favoured of His followers, that He was more 
than * that Prophet,' it would seem to follow that the 
essence of His Kingdom was, not the doctrine which 
they did not and could not as yet accept, but the 
higher life they saw Christ leading, the life of the soul ; 
and which, seeing, they reverenced, and reverencing, 
as far as might be, wished to imitate. The Sermon 
on the Mount, so far as that which is indescribable 
can be described at all, and that which is the fountain 
head of goodness in infinitely varied types can be 
judged by one or two of the rills which issue from it, 
is little else than Christ's own life translated into 
words ; and those who, least imperfectly, re-translated 



CHRISTIANITY 7 

His words back into their own lives, were the very 
' salt of the earth.' They were members of the 
Kingdom of Heaven, even though they did not be- 
lieve, as some did not even to the end, that He who 
* spake as never man spake ' was something more 
than man. 

If we go back to the ipsissiina verba, so far as we 
can now get at them, of Christ Himself, how much 
of the doctrine that we are apt to attribute to Christ, we 
shall find to be Pauline — how much more Patristic, 
Scholastic, Puritan ! /How little dogma, and how much 
morality, there is in the Founder of our religion ;/how 
few words, and how many works ; how little about 
consequences, how much about motives ; in a word, 
how little theology, and how much religion ! I do not 
of course mean to deny that Moses, Buddha, Christ 
Himself were founders of a theology as well as of a 
life ; I only say that the life came first, since it was 
that which was most called for by the time, and it was 
their new views of life which prepared their followers 
to receive and develope their new views of God. * If 
any man will do His will, he shall know of the doc- 
trine whether it be of God.' ' He that loveth not his 
brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God 
whom he hath not seen .'' ' * Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God.' 

I am aware that distinguished German philoso- 



8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

/ 

pherS; Max Miiller among them,^ have laid it down 
that men cannot form themselves into a people till 
they have come to an agreement about their religion, 
and that community of faith is a bond of union more 
fundamental than any other bond at all. But I do 
not think that if the distinction which I have drawn 
between the primeval and the historical Religions of 
the world be kept in sight, there is much necessary 
antagonism between their view and mine ; that a new 
religion is, in order of time, the outcome and not the 
cause of a general movement towards a higher life, 
whether moral or national. Religion is, no doubt, 
practically all that they say it is, a tie so strong that 
it can give an ideal unity, as it did in Greece, to tribes 
differing from one another in degrees of civilisation, 
in interests and in dialect ; but it does not follow that 
it was historically ever the original moving power in 
the aggregation of scattered tribes, or that a new 
religion was at first a revelation of God rather than 
a revelation of morality. There must have been 
a previous community of race and language for the 
religion to work upon ; there must also have been 
a strong, though very possibly an ill-directed and a 
desultory upheaval of society. The fragments still 
existing of the primeval creed are no doubt a factor 
in that upheaval, and feel its force ; but the new 

' ' Introduction to the Science of Religion,' Lecture III., 144-153. 



RELIGION IN GREECE 9 

religion is the result and not the cause of the general 
movement. It is not till later that it pays the debt it 
owes to what gave it birth, by lending a higher sanc- 
tion to each institution of the . new society, and so 
does in truth become, what philosophers say it is, the 
most important bond in a national life. First the as- 
pirations, then that which satisfies them ! First a new 
conception of the relation of men to one another, then 
that conception sanctioned, vivified, lit up by the 
newly perceived relation of all alike to God ! 

I would also remark that Greece itself, though 
Max Miiller appeals to it in favour of his own con- 
clusions, seems to supply an argument in favour 
of my view. For even in the Persian wars the com- 
mon danger and the common hatred of the * Bar- 
barian ' failed to bring about more than a very tran- 
sitory coalition between two or three of the leading 
states. The ideal unity of the Greek races was only 
an ideal, and Panhellenism never went so far as 
to unite the different states into a homogeneous 
people. If there had been a real and spontaneous 
movement among the autonomous cities' of Greece 
towards centralisation, a great reformer might have 
taken advantage of it, and working upon the 'dim 
recollection of the common allegiance they owed 
from time immemorial to the great Father of Gods 
and men, the old Zeus of Dodona, the Panhellenic 



lO MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Zeus,' ^ have welded the fragments into a nation. 
The One would not merely have been dimly discerned 
behind the Many by the highest minds, but the per- 
ception would have been converted into a practical 
reality. The intellectual mission of Socrates might 
have taken something of the shape, and realised some- 
thing of the results of the mission of Mohammed. 
But there was no such national movement in Greece, 
and therefore no opportunity either for the birth of a 
new religion, or a revival of the old one. In Greek 
Polytheism we see historically nothing but decay, 
Mythology having completely overgrown the Religion. 
The gross stories of Homer and of Hesiod which so 
scandalized Socrates and Plato, had, even at that early 
time, concealed from all but the highest minds the 
vague primitive belief, common probably to the whole 
Indo-Germanic race, in one Father who is in Heaven. 

To what extent the principle I have laid down as 
to the origin of the three great historical religions, is 
also true of that of Mohammed, will develope itself 
gradually in the sequel. 

It has been remarked, indeed, by writer after 
writer, that Islam is less interesting than other reli- 
gions, inasmuch as it is less original. And this is one 
of the favourite charges brought against It by Chris- 
tian apologists. In the first place, I am Inclined to 

* ' Science of Religion,' p. 148. 



IS ISLAM ORIGINAL? ' ii 

think that the charge of want of originaHty, though it 
cannot be denied, has been overdone by recent writers ; 
most conspicuously so by M. Renan, who, ingenious 
and beautiful as his Essay is, seems disposed to ex- 
plain the whole fabric of Islamism by the ideas that 
existed before Mohammed ; and the political direction 
given to it by his successors, most notably by Omar ; 
in fact, it seems to me that the only element left out, 
or not accounted for, in his analysis of Mohammedan- 
ism, is Mohammed himself His Mohammedanism 
resembles a Hamlet with not only the Prince of Den- 
mark, but with Shakespeare himself cut out. The 
disjointed members and some few elements of the 
fabric remain ; about as much as we should have of 
the Hamlet of Shakespeare in the Amlettus of Saxo- 
Grammaticus ; but the informing, animating, inspiring 
soul is wanting. 

It is undeniable that a vague and hearsay acquaint- 
ance with the Old Testament, the Talmud, and the 
New Testament, and the undefined religious cravings 
of a few of his immediate predecessors, or contempo- 
raries, influenced Mohammed much, and traces of them 
at second hand may be found in ever}^ other page of 
the Koran ; but then, in the second place, it may be 
asked whether want of originality is any reproach to 
a religion ; for what is religion } 

It is that something, which, whether it is a collec- 



12 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

tion of shadows projected by the mind itself upon the 
mirror of the external world, explaining the Macro- 
cosm by the Microcosm, and invested with a reality 
which belongs only to the mind that casts them, if 
indeed even to that, or whether it is indeed an insight 
of the soul into realities which exist independently of 
it, and which underlie alike the world of sense and the 
world of reason ; it is something, at all events, which 
satisfies the spiritual wants of man. Man's spiritual 
wants, v/hatever their origin, are his truest wants ; and 
the something which satisfies those wants is the most 
real of all realities to him. 

The founder, therefore, of a religion which is to 
last must read the spiritual needs of a nation correctly, 
or at all events must be capable of seeing the direc- 
tion in which they lead, and the development they will 
one day take. If he read them correctly, he need not 
care about any originality beyond that which such 
insight implies ; he Avill rather do well to avoid it. The 
religious world was startled a few years ago by the 
revelations of an Oriental scholar that much supposed 
to be exclusively the doctrine of the New Testament 
is to be found in the Talmud, as though some reflec- 
tion was thereby cast upon the Founder of our religion ! 
Positivists, again, have laid great stress on the fact 
that some of the moral precepts supposed to be exclu- 
sively Christian are to be found in the sacred writings 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 13, 

of Confucius and the Buddhists. But what then ? Is a 
religion less true because it recognises itself in other 
garbs, because it incorporates in itself all that is best 
in the system which it expands or supplants ? What 
if we found the whole Sermon on the Mount dispersed 
about the writings of the Jewish Rabbis, as we unques- 
tionably find some part of it ? Christ himself was 
always the first to assert that He came, not to destroy,/ 
but to fulfil. But it is strange that the avowed relation 
of Christianity to Judaism has not protected Islam 
from the assaults of Christian apologists, grounded 
on its avowed relation to the two together ! 

But what of interest, I am free to admit, the religion 
of Mohammed loses on the score of originality, it gains 
in the greater fulness of our knowledge of its origin. 
It is the latest and most historical of the great reli- 
gions of the world. / 

Renan has remarked that the origin of nearly all 
the leading phenomena of life and history is obscure. 
What, for instance, can Max Miiller tell us of the 
origin of language 1 What well-authenticated facts can 
political philosophers like Hobbes or Locke, or even 
scientific antiquaries like Sir Charles Lyell or Sir John 
Lubbock, tell us of the origin of society t What can 
Darwin tell us of the origin of life t Trace the genea- 
logy of all existing languages into the three great groups 
of Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian ; find, if you can, the 



14 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

parent language from which even these three famihes 
have originally diverged ; are we any nearer an expla- 
nation of what language really is ? Our hopes, indeed, 
are aroused by hints dropped throughout Max Miiller's 
fascinating book that he has a secret to divulge to 
those who have gone through an adequate process of 
initiation. But to our disappointment we find that 
the explanation of * Phonetic Types ' is only a round- 
about way of saying what, no doubt, is true, that lan- 
guage is instinctive, and that we know nothing what- 
ever of its origin. That sound expresses thought we 
knew before ; but how does it express it .-* That is 
the question. Trace elaborately through Geological 
Periods, if you can, the steps by which the Monad has 
been developed into Man, and show that there is no. 
link wanting, and that Nature, so far as w^e can trace, 
never makes a leap. Perhaps not ; but there is a leap 
somewhere, and who can say how vast the leap before 
the Protoplasm can have received the something that 
is not Protoplasm but Life, and which has all the dig- 
nity of life, even though it be a Monad's } 

So, too, if the Science of Religion lasts long enough, 
we may one day be able to trace a continuity of 
growth from the very dawn of man's belief till, as in 
history so in religion, 

* We doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.' 



ELEMENTS OF RELIGION 15 

We shall find, however, that, even in the dimmest- 
dawn of history, the essence of religion was already 
there, not forming, but already formed ; a feeling of 
mystery which, as it is the beginning of philosophy, 
so, perhaps, it is the very first beginning of rehgion ; 
the distinction between right and wrong ; the idea of 
a Power which is neither Man's nor external Nature's, 
though it is evidenced by them both ; the sense that 
there is something in this world amiss ; and the fear, 
or, possibly, the hope, that it may be unriddled by- 
and-bye.^ Where did those ideas come from ? And 
do we know anything more of the origin of religion 
itself by having traced it to some of its elements ? 

And, what is true of religion generally, is also true, 
unfortunately, of those three religions which I have 
called, for want of a better name, historical — and 
of their founders. We know all too little of the first 
and earliest labourers ; too much, perhaps, of those 
who have entered into their labours. We know less 



* I do not mean to touch here upon the disputed question M'hether 
there are races without any definite rehgious ideas at all. Sir John 
Lubbock ('Origin of Civilisation,' cap. iv.) has brought together the 
testimony of many missionaries and travellers as to a great variety of 
tribes, which seem to be, at all events, without anything beyond the 
elements I have named ; but I much doubt whether these elements, 
or some of them, do not exist in all tribes, even in the lowest. It is 
certain that a longer acquaintance and minuter observation among 
savage tribes, especially the African, have often led to the reversal of an 
opinion naturally but hastily formed in the first instance. See Waitz, 
* Anthropologic der Naturvolker, ' ii. 4. 



i6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAAiMEDANISM 

of Zoroaster and Confucius than we do of Solon and 
Socrates ; less of Moses and of Buddha than we do of 
Ambrose and Augustine. We know indeed some 
fragments of a fragment of Christ's life ; but who can 
lift the veil of the thirty years that prepared the way 
for the three ? What we do know indeed has renovated 
a third of the world, and may yet renovate much 
more ; an ideal of life at once remote and near ; pos- 
sible and impossible ; but how much we do not know ! 
What do we know of His mother, of His home life, of 
His early friends, and His relation to them, of the 
gradual dawning, or, it may be, the sudden revelation, 
of His divine mission ? How many questions about 
Him occur to each of us that must always remain 
questions ! 

But in Mohammedanism everything is different ; 
here instead of the shadowy and the mysterious we have 
history.^ We know as much of Mohammed as we do 
even of Luther and Milton. The mythical, the 
legendary, the supernatural is almost wanting in the 
original Arab authorities, or at all events can easily 
be distinguished from what is historical.^ Nobody 

^ Cf. Renan, 'Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse,' pp. 220 and 230. 

2 The belief in Jinn, beings created of smokeless fire 2,000 years 
before Adam, as a part of the original Arab mythology, was not discarded 
by Mohammed (Koran, Sura i. 7-8 ; xlvi. 28, 29 ; Ivii. 17-18, Ixxii. i, 
&c.), but, in other respects, the miraculous and mythological element 
in. Mohammedanism comes almost exclusively from Persian sources. 



FULL KNOWLEDGE OF LSLAM . 17 

here is the dupe of himself or of others ; there is the full 
light of day upon all that that light can ever reach at all. 
* The abysmal depths of personality ' indeed are, and 
must always remain, beyond the reach of any line and 
plummet of ours. But we know everything of the 
external history of Mohammed — his youth, his ap- 
pearance, his relations, his habits ; the first idea and 
the gradual growth, intermittent though it was, of his 
great revelation ; while for his internal history, after 
his mission had been proclaimed, we have a book 
absolutely unique in its origin, in its preservation, 
and in the chaos of its contents, but on the authenti- 
city of which no one has ever been able to cast a 
serious doubt. There, if in any book, we have a 
mirror of one of the master-spirits of the world ; often 
inartistic, incoherent, self-contradictory, dull, but im- 
pregnated with a few grand ideas which stand out 
from the whole ; a mind seething with the inspiration 
pent within it, * intoxicated with God,' but full of 
human weaknesses, from which he never pretended — 



Persia has revenged the destruction of her national faith by corrupting 
in many particulars the simplicity of the creed of her conquerors. For 
an exhaustive account of Arab ideas on the Jinn, their creation, their 
influence on human affairs, and their abode, see Note 21 to the Intro- 
duction of Lane's edition of 'The Thousand and One Nights.' The 
legends illustrating the power of Solomon over the Genii are well 
known. The notes to Lane's edition of the ' Arabian Nights ' form 
a storehouse of accurate information upon Arab manners and cus- 
toms. 



1 8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

and it is his lasting glory that he never pretended — 
to be free.^ 

Upon the striking resemblances between the Ko- 
ran and the Bible — the book with which it is most 
naturally compared — and the still moi-e striking dif- 
ferences, I need not now dwell at length, especially 
as the latter have been admirably drawn out by Dean 
Stanley.^ 

To compress, as best I may, into a few sentences 
what he has said so well, making only a few amend- 
ments where, from my point of view, they seem to be 
called for. — The Koran lays claim to a verbal, literal, 
and mechanical inspiration in every part alike, and is 
regarded as such by almost all Mohammedans. The 
Bible makes no such claim, except In one or two con- 
troverted passages ; and there are few Christians who 
do not now admit at least a human element in every 
part of it. The text of the Koran is stereotyped ; in the 
Bible there is an immense variety of readings. The 
Koran has hitherto proved to be incapable of har- 
monious translation into other languages ; the Bible 
loses little or nothing in the process. The Bible is 
the work of a large number of poets, prophets, states- 
men, and lawgivers, extending over a vast period of 

* It was a proverbial saying in very early times among Mussulmans 
that • Mohammed's character was the Koran.' 

^ ' Lectures on the Eastern Church,' viii. p. 266-273. 



KORAN AND BIBLE COMPARED 19 

time, and incorporates with itself other and earher, 
and often conflicting documents; the Koran comes 
straight from the brain, sometimes from the ravings, 
of an unlettered enthusiast, who yet in this proved 
himself to be poet and prophet, statesman and law- 
giver in one. /Finally, the strength of the Koran lies 
in its uniformity, in its intolerance, in its narrow^ness ; 
the strength of the Bible in its variety, its toleration, 
its universality. In all these points, as in the more 
important one of the morality of its highest revela- 
tions, the supremacy of our sacred books over the one 
sacred book of the Mohammedans is indisputable. 

Dean Stanley asks somewhat triumphantly, but on 
the whole rightly enough, whether there is a single 
passage in the Koran that can be named, as a proof 
of inspiration, with St. Paul's description of Charity. 
But it is worth remarking that a traditional sermon of 
Mohammed's has been preserved, quoted by Washing- 
ton Irving,^ which, though it is in no way equal to this, 
the sublimest passage of the greatest of the Apostles, 
yet shows a real insight into the nature and comprehen- 
siveness of this Christian grace ; and may at all events 
serve as a comment on i Corinthians xiii. It is in 
the form of an Apologue : * When God made the 
earth, it shook to and fro till He put mountains on it 
to keep it firm.' — Then the angels asked, * O God, is 

' ' Life of Mahomet,' p. 87. He is quoting from Abu Hurairah. 

c 2 



20 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

there anything in thy creation stronger than these 
mountains ? — And God replied, ' Iron is stronger than 
the mountains, for it breaks them.' — 'And is there 
anything in thy creation stronger than iron ? ' — 
' Yes, fire is stronger than iron, for it melts it.' — ' Is 
there anything stronger than fire V — 'Yes, water, for 
it quenches fire.' — ' Is there anything stronger than 
water } ' — ' Yes, wind, for it puts water in motion.' — 
' O our Sustainer ! is there anything in thy creation 
stronger than wind } ' — ' Yes, a good man giving alms ; 
if he .give with his right hand and conceal it from 
his left, he overcomes all things.' But Mohammed 
did not end here, or restrict his notion of charity to 
the somewhat narrow sense which, in common lan- 
guage, it bears now, that of liberal and unostentatious 
almsgiving ; he went on to give almost as wide a 
definition of Charity as St. Paul himself. ' Every 
good act is charity ; your smiling in your brother's 
face ; your putting a wanderer in the right road ; 
your giving water to the thirsty is charity ; exhor- 
tations to another to do right are charity. A man's 
true wealth hereafter is the good he has done in 
this world to his fellow-man. When he dies, people 
will ask, what property has he left behind him } But 
the angels will ask, what good deeds has he sent 
before him } ' 

But from one point of view the Koran has to the 



MOHAMMED'S VIEW OF CHARITY 21 

comparative mythologlst, and therefore to the student 
of human nature, an interest quite unique, and not the 
less absorbing that it springs out of the very defects 
that I have pointed out. By studying the Koran, 
together with the history of Mohammedanism, we see 
with our own eyes, what we can only infer or imagine 
in other cases, the precise steps by which a religion 
naturally and necessarily developes into a mythology. 
In the Koran we have, beyond all doubt, the exact 
words of Mohammed without subtraction and without 
addition. We see with our own eyes the birth and 
adolescence of a religion. In the history of Moham- 
medanism we descry the parasitical growth that 
fastens on it, even in its founder's lifetime. We see 
the way in which a man who denied that he could 
work miracles, is believed to work them even by his 
contemporaries, and how in the next generation the ex- 
travagant vision of the nocturnal flight to the seventh 
heaven, with all its gorgeous imagery, arid the revo- 
lutions of the moon round the Kaaba, is taken for 
sober fact, and is propagated with all the elaboration 
of details, which, if they came from anybody, could 
have come only from Mohammed himself; and yet all 
of it with the most perfect good faith. We see how a 
man, who, though he had once in an outburst of anger 
uttered a prophecy which turned out true, always 
denied that he could predict the future, and was yet, 



22 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

in spite of himself, credited with all the supernatural 
insight of a seer. Lastly, we mark how the formalities 
and the sacrifices and the idolatries which he spent his 
life in overthrowing, revived in another shape out of 
the frequency of prayers and fasts that he enjoined, 
and of the pilgrimages he permitted. The holy places 
themselves became more holy, as having been the 
scene of his preaching and of his death, and so, in 
time, received more than human honours. We know 
from history what the outgrowth and superstructure 
have been, and we read in the Koran how narrow the 
foundation was. 

But from the Bible, by its very nature, and owing 
to those peculiarities which constitute its special 
strength, we fail to know, in the same sense, the exact 
limits of the foundation of the Christendom that has 
overspread the world. In the outward shape in which 
it has come down to us, and in the questions con- 
nected with the authorship of its different parts and the 
variety of its contents, the Bible resembles not so much 
the Koran as the Sonna, which is, of course, rejected by 
the Sheeah half of the Mohammedan races. Even in 
the Gospels as we have them, comment and inference 
and the individuality of the writer are mixed with 
verbal accuracy and exact observation. We can 
detect conflicting currents of feeling and of thought 
which it taxes the ingenuity and honesty, even of 



GROWTH OF MYTHOLOGY 23 

harmonists to harmonise. The New Testament is not 
less, but more valuable because of these discrepancies. 
Its undesigned discrepancies have been as valuable in 
widening the base of our Christianity as its unde- 
signed coincidences are in assuring it. Whether we 
may legitimately apply the inferences to be drawn 
from our full knowledge of the growth of Moham- 
medanism to our imperfect knowledge of the growth 
of other religions is, of course, open to argument, but 
the interest and importance of the enquiry can hardly 
be over-estimated. 

But over and above the interest attaching to the 
one religion of the world which is strictly historical in 
its origin, and which therefore may, rightly or wrongly, 
be used to explain the origin of those of which 
we know less, there is the fascination that must 
always attach to those mixed characters of w^homi 
we know so much, and yet so little ; who have made 
the world what it is, and yet whom the world cannot 
read. 

' Hero, impostor, fanatic, priest, or sage : ' 

which element predominates in the man as a whole 
we may perhaps discover, and most certainly we can 
say now it was not the impostor ; but taking him at 
different times and under different circumstances, the 
more one reads the more one distrusts one's own con- 



24 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

elusions, and, as Dean Mllman remarks, answers with 
the Arab * Allah only knows.' ^ 

• Nor does Mohammedanism lack other claims on 
our attention. Its ultimate enthusiastic acceptance 
by the Arabs, the new direction given to it by the 
later revelations to Mohammed, its rapid conquests, 
the literature and civilisation it brought in its train, 
the way in which it cru'mpled up the Roman empire 
on one side and the Persian on the other ; how it 
drove Christianity before it on the West and North, 
and Fire- Worship on the East and South ; how it 
crushed the false prophets that always follow in the 
wake of a true one, as the jackals do the trail of a 
lion ; how it spread over two continents, and how it 
settled in a third, and at one time all but over- 
whelmed the whole, till Charles the Hammer, on the 
field of Tours, turned it back upon itself; how the 
indivisible empire, the representative on earth of the 
Theocracy in heaven, became many empires, with rival 
Kaliphs at Damascus and Bagdad, at Cairo, Cairoan, 
and Cordova ; how horde after horde of barbarians of 
the great Turkish or Tartar stock were precipitated 
on the dominions of the faithful, only to be conquered 
by the faith of those whose arms they overthrew ; 
how, when the news came that the very birth-place of 
the Christian faith had fallen into their hands, ' a 

' Latin Christianity, I. 555. 



HISTORY OF ISLAM 25 

nerve was touched,' as Gibbon says, * of exquisite 
feeling, and the sensation vibrated . to the heart of 
Europe ;' how Christendom itself thus became for two 
hundred years half Mohammedanised, and tried to 
meet fanaticism by counter-fanaticism — the sword, 
the Bible, and the Cross, against the scymitar, the 
Koran, and the Crescent ; how, lastly, when the tide 
of aggression had been checked, it once more burst 
its barriers, and seating itself on the throne of the 
Cssars of the East, threatened more than once the 
very centre of Christendom — all this is matter of 
history, at which I can only glance. / 

And what is its position now ? 

It numbers at this day more than one hundred 
millions, probably one hundred and fifty millions, of 
believers as sincere, as devout, as true to their creed 
as are the believers in any creed whatever. It still 
has its grip on three continents, extending from 
Morocco to the Malay peninsula, from Zanzibar to 
the Kirghis horde. It embraces within its ample cir- 
cumference two extensive empires, one Sonnee, the 
other Sheeah, the first of which, though it has often 
been pronounced sick unto death or even dead, is 
not dead yet, and is even showing signs of reviving 
vitality. It still grasps the cradles of the Jewish and 
of the Christian faith, and the spots most dear to 
both, Mount Sinai and the Cave of Macpelah, the 



26 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy 
Sepulchre. Africa, which had yielded so early to 
Christianity, nay, which had given birth to Latin 
Christianity itself, the Africa of Cyprian and Ter- 
tullian, of Antony and of Augustine, yielded still 
more readily to Mohammed ; and from the Straits of 
Gibraltar to the Isthmus of Suez may still be heard 
the cry which with them is no vain repetition of 
* Allahu-Akbar,' — God is great, there is no God but 
God, and Mohammed is His prophet. 

And if it be said, as it often is, that Mohammed- 
anism has gained nothing since the first flame of re- 
ligious enthusiasm, fanned, as it then often was, by the 
lust of conquest, has died out, I answer that this is 
far from the truth. 

In the extreme East, Mohammedanism has since 
then won and maintained for centuries a moral su- 
premacy in the important Chinese province of Yun- 
Nan, and has thus actually succeeded in thrusting a 
wedge between the two great Buddhist empires of 
Burmah and of China. Within our own memory, 
indeed, after a fifteen years' war, and under the 
leadership of Ta Wen Siu, one of those half-military, 
half-religious geniuses, which Islam seems always ca- 
pable of producing, it succeeded in wresting from the 
Celestial Empire a territorial supremacy in the western 
half of this province. Two years ago an embassy of 



ISLAM IN CHINA 27 

intelligent and, it is worth adding, of progressive and 
of tolerant Mussulmans from Yun-Nan, headed by 
Prince Hassan, son of the chieftain who had now 
become the Sultan Soliman, appeared in our own 
country, and the future of the Panthays,^ as they are 
called, began at length to attract attention, not so 
much, I fear, from the extraordinary interest attach- 
ing to their religious history — that interests few Eng- 
lishmen — as to the possible opening to our Eastern 
trade, the only Gospel which most Englishmen care 
now to preach, and one which Ave did consistently 
for many years propagate by our commercial wars 
in China and Japan, at the expense of every principle 
of religion and humanity. Unfortunately the interests 
of our trade were not sufficiently bound up with the 
existence of the Panthays to call for any representa- 
tions on our part, and Prince Hassan was compelled 
to return to Asia without any prospect of moral 
support from us or from the Sultan of Turkey. 
On arriving at Rangoon he was met by the news 
that the Mussulmans had at length been over- 
powered by the fearful odds arrayed against them ; 
that Tali-Fu, the capital, had fallen, and men, women, 
and children to the number of some thirty thousand 

* A name given to them by their Burmese neighbours, from whom 
the word has passed into the Western World. It is said to be a cor- 
ruption of the Burmese 'Putthee,' i.e., Mohammedan. 



28 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

had been massacred by the victors. The fate of 
Momlen, the other stronghold, was of course only a 
question of time ; but though the short-lived Moham- 
medan sovereignty has been destroyed, and what was 
won by the sword has since perished by the sword, 
Mohammedanism itself has not been extinguished in 
the Celestial Empire. Within the last eight years 
that vast tract of country called Western Chinese 
Tartary or Eastern Turkestan, has thrown off the 
yoke of China, and has added another to the list of 
Mussulman kingdoms. Khoten and Yarkand and 
Kashgar are united under the vigorous rule of the 
Atalik Ghazee,^ Yakoob Beg. Whatever may be his 
private character, the abolition of the slave trade 
throughout his dominions, his rigid administration of 
justice, his readiness to establish commercial relations 
with India, and the respect shown even by the Meccan 
pilgrims among his subjects for Christianity are some 
indication of what Mohammedanism may yet have in 
store for it in Central Asia under the influence of a 
master mind, and with the modifications that are pos- 
sible or necessary to it. Throughout the Chinese 

^ The title was given him by the Ameer of Bokhara. It means 
' Guardian of the Champions of Rehgion.' For the abolition of the 
slave trade see the best authority on the subject, Shaw's ' High 
Tartary,' p. 347 ; and for the view of Christians taken by some pil- 
grims to Mecca from Central Asia, p. 65. The letters received from 
Mr. Forsyth's Mission (see Ti?nes, of March 17, 1874) seem quite to 
bear out the view I had formed of Yakoob Beg's position. 



ISLAM IN EAST INDIAN ISLANDS 29 

Empire, at Karachar for instance, there are scattered 
Mussulman communities who have higher hopes than 
Buddhism or Confucianism, and a purer morality than 
Taoism can supply. The- Panthays themselves, it 
is believed, still number a million and a half, and the 
unity of God and the mission of God's prophet are 
attested day by day by a continuous line of wor- 
shippers from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. 

Nay, even beyond, in the East Indian Archi- 
pelago, beyond the Straits of Malacca, if I may 
venture just now so to call them, in Java and 
Sumatra, in Borneo and Celebes, Islam has raised 
many of the natives above their former selves, and 
has long been the dominant faith. It established 
itself in the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra in the 
fourteenth, and in Java and Celebes in the fif- 
teenth century ; and it is interesting to note, as is 
remarked by Crawfurd, that about the time it was 
being gradually expelled from Western Europe, it 
made up for its expulsion by extending itself to 
the East of Asia. The Arab missionaries were 
just in time, for they anticipated by only a few years 
the first advent of grasping Portuguese and ambitious 
Spaniards. It cannot, of course, be supposed that 
among races so low in the scale of humanity as 
are most of the Indian islanders, Mohammedanism 
would be able to do what it did originally for the 



36 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Arabs or for the Turkish hordes ; but it has done 
something even for them. It expelled Hindooism from 
some islands, and a very corrupt Buddhism from others. 
It was propagated by missionaries who cared very 
much for the souls they could win, and nothing for the 
plunder they could carry off. They conciliated the 
natives, learned their languages, and intermarried with 
them ; and in the larger islands their success was 
rapid, and, so far as nature would allow, complete.^ 
The Philippines and the Moluccas, which were con- 
quered by Spain and Portugal respectively, did not 
become Mohammedan, for they had to surrender at 
once their liberty and their religion. It is no wonder 
that the religion known to the natives chiefly through 
the unblushing rapacity of the Portuguese, and the 
terrible cruelties of the Dutch, has not extended itself 
beyond the reach of their swords. Here, as elsewhere 
in the East, the most fatal hindrance to the spread of 
Christianity has been the lives of Christians.^ I will 
only add further that the Mussulmans of the East 
India Islands are very lax in their obedience to many 
of the precepts of their law, that they are tolerant of 

^ Crawfurd's ' Indian Archipelago,' II. 275 and 315. 

- For the cruelties of the Portuguese, see Crawfurd, II. 403, and 
for the Dutch, see especially II. 425 seq. and 441. For some startling 
facts as to the comparative morality of some native and Christian com- 
munities in India, see a paper by the Rev, J. N. Thoburn, in the Report 
of the Allahabad Missionary Conference, held in 1872-73, p. 467-470. 



ISLAM IN AFRICA 



31 



other religions, and that the women enjoy a liberty, a 
position, and an influence which contrasts favourably 
with that allowed to them in any other Asiatic 
country.^ 

In Africa, again, Mohammedanism is spreading 
itself by giant strides almost year by year. Everyone 
knows that, within half a century from the Prophet's 
death, the richest states of Africa, and those most acces- 
sible to Christianity and to European civilisation, were 
torn away from both, by the armies of the faithful, 
with hardly a struggle or a regret ; but few except 
those who have studied the subject, are aware that, 
ever since then, Mohammedanism has been gradually 
spreading over the northern half of the Continent. 

Starting from the north-west corner, it first 
marched southwards from Morocco, and by the time 
of the Norman Conquest had reached the neighbour- 
hood of Timbuctoo, and had got firm hold of the 
Mandingoes ; thence it spread southwards again to the 
Foulahs, and then eastward by the thirteenth century 
to Lake Tchad, where finally the Arab missionaries 
from the West joined hands with those from the East 
in the very heart of Africa.^ Of course enormous 



^ Crawfurd, II. 260 and 269-271 j and Sir Stamford Raffles' 'Java,* 
I. p. 261 and II. 2-5. 

*' Anthropologic der Naturwolker,' by Dr. Theodor Waitz, p. 248- 
251. 



32 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

tracts of heathenism were left, and are still left, in 
various parts of this vast area, and it is mainly among 
these that, at this day, Mohammedan missionaries are 
meeting everywhere with a marked success which is 
denied to our own. We hear of whole tribes laying 
aside their devil-worship, or immemorial Fetish, and 
springing at a bound, as it were, from the very lowest 
to one of the highest forms of religious belief. Chris- 
tian travellers, with every wish to think otherwise, 
have remarked that the negro who accepts Moham- 
medanism acquires at once a sense of the dignity of 
human nature not commonly found even among those 
who have been brought to accept Christianity. 

It is also pertinent to observe here, that such pro- 
gress as any large part of the negro race has hitherto 
made is in exact proportion to the time that has elapsed, 
or to the degree of fervour with which they originally 
embraced, or have since clung to Islam. The Man- 
dingoes and the Foulahs are salient instances of this ; 
their unquestionable superiority to other negro tribes 
is as unquestionably owing to the early hold that 
Islam got upon them, and to the civilisation and cul- 
ture that it has always encouraged. 

Nor can it be said that it is only among those 
negroes who have never heard anything of a purer 
faith that Mohammedanism is making such rapid pro- 
gress. The Government Blue Books on our West 



RAPID SPREAD IN AFRICA NOW 33 

African settlements, and the reports of missionary 
societies themselves, are quite at one on this head. 
The Governor of our West African colonies, Mr. Pope 
Hennessy, remarks that the liberated Africans are 
always handed over to Christian missionaries for in- 
struction, and that their children are baptised and 
brought up at the public expense in Christian schools, 
and are, therefore, in a sense, ready-made converts. Yet 
the total number of professing Christians, 35,000 out of 
a population of 5 13,000— very few even of these, as the 
Governor says, and as we can unfortunately well 
believe from our experience in countries that are not 
African, being practical Christians — falls far short 
of the original number of liberated Africans and their 
descendants.^ On the other hand, the Rev. James 
Johnson, a native clergyman, and a man of remarkable 
energy and intelligence as well as of very Catholic 
spirit, deplores the fact that, of the total number of 
Mohammedans to be found in Sierra Leone and its 
neighbourhood, three-fourths were not born Moham- 
medans, but have become so by conversion, whether 
from a nominal Christianity or from Paganism.^ 

* Papers relating to Her Majesty's Colonial Possessions. Part II., 
1873, 2nd division, p. 14. 

2 Ibid, p, 15. As Mr. Pope Hennessy's Report has been much 
criticised, chiefly on the gi'ound that he is a Roman Catholic 
(see a letter to the Times, of Oct. 21, 1873, signed 'Audi alteram 
partem'), and as I have based some statements upon it, it maybe 
worth mentioning that I have had a conversation with Mr. Johnson, 

D 



34 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

And, what is still more to our purpose to remark 
here, Mohammedanism, as it spreads now, is not 
attended by some of the drawbacks which accom- 
panied its first introduction into the country. It is 
spread, not by the sword, but by earnest and simple- 
minded Arab missionaries. It has also lost, except 
in certain well-defined districts, much of its in- 
tolerant and exclusive character. The two leading 
doctrines of Mohammedanism, and the general moral 
precepts of the Koran, are, of course, inculcated 
everywhere. But, in other respects, the Mussulman 
missionaries exhibit a forbearance, a sympathy, and a 
respect for native customs and prejudices, and even 
for their more harmless beliefs, which is no doubt one 
reason of their success, and which our own mis- 
sionaries and schoolmasters would do well to imitate. 
We are assured, on all hands, that the Mussulman 
population has an almost passionate desire for educa- 
tion, and those in the neighbourhood of our colonies 
would throng our schools, first if the practical educa- 

who is a strong Protestant himself, and that he bore testimony to the 
bona fides of the Report, and to its accuracy even on some points which 
have been most questioned. He told me that Mohammedanism was 
introduced into Sierra Leone, not many years ago, by three zealous mis- 
sionaries who came from a great distance. It seems now to be rapidly 
gaining the ascendency, in spite of all the European influences at work. 
It may perhaps be questioned, since he does not dwell much upon it, 
whether Mr. Pope Hennessy, in his remarks on the diminished number 
of Christians in Sierra Leone, made allowance for the return of a certain 
number of true Christians, such as Bishop Cro wther, to their own countries. 



INTELLECTUAL BENEFITS IN AFRICA 35 

tlon given was more worth having, and, secondly, if the 
teachers would refrain from needlessly attacking their 
cherished and often harmless customs. Wherever 
Mohammedans are numerous, they establish schools 
themselves ; and there are not a few who travel ex- 
traordinary distances to secure the best possible 
education. Mr. Pope Hennessy mentions the case 
of one young Mohammedan negro who is in the habit 
of purchasing costly books from Triibner in London, 
and who went to Futah, two hundred and fifty miles 
away, to obtain an education better than he could 
find in Sierra Leone itself^ Nor is it an uncommon 
thing for newly converted Mussulmans to make their 
way right across the Desert from Bornu, or from Lake 
Tchad, or down the Nile from Darfour or Wadal, a 
journey of over one thousand miles, that they may 
carry on their studies in El-Azhar, the great collegiate 
Mosque at Cairo, and may thence bring back the results 
of their training to their native country, and form so 
many centres of Mohammedan teaching and example.^ 
Nor as to the effects of Islam when first embraced 
by a negro tribe, can there be any reasonable 
doubt. Polytheism disappears almost instantaneously; 

' Ibid. p. 10. 

"- Waitz, p. 251. He calculates the number of students returning each 
year to be about fifty. To his book, and to the authorities to whom he 
refers, I owe many of the facts mentioned in the text illustrative of the 
influence of Islam on the native mind and character. 

D 2 



36 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

sorcery, with its attendant evils, gradually dies away ; 
human sacrifice becomes a thing of the past. The 
general moral elevation is most marked ; the natives 
begin for the first time in their history to dress, 
and that neatly. Squalid filth is replaced by a scru- 
pulous cleanliness ; hospitality becomes a religious 
duty ; drunkenness, instead of the rule, becomes a 
comparatively rare exception. Though polygamy is 
allowed by the Koran, it is not common in practice, 
and, beyond the limits laid down by the Prophet, 
incontinence is rare ; Chastity is looked upon as one 
of the highest, and becomes, in fact, one of the com- 
moner virtues. It is idleness henceforward that de- 
grades, and industry that elevates, instead of the reverse. 
Offences are henceforward measured by a written 
code instead of the arbitrary caprice of a chieftain — a 
step, as everyone will admit, of vast importance in the 
progress of a tribe. The Mosque gives an idea of 
architecture at all events higher than any the negro 
has yet had. A thirst for literature is created, and 
that for works of science and philosophy as well as 
for commentaries on the Koran. ^ There are whole 

^ Waitz, p. 252-254. Aristotle and Plato are known to not a few 
Mohammedans in the interior — Earth, in his ' Travels in Central Africa,' 
Vol. V. p. 63, mentions that Sidi Mohammed, of Timbuctoo, main- 
tained that they were both Mussulmans, that is to say, worshippers of 
the true God. Cf III., 373, for the case of a Pullo at Massera, who 
had read Plato and Aristotle in Arabic, was well acquainted with the 
history of Spain, and sympathised with the Wahhabees. 



MORAL BENEFITS IN AFRICA 37 

tribes, such as the Jolofs on the river Gambia, and the 
Haussas, whose manly quaUties we have had occasion 
to test in Ashantee, which have become to a man 
Mohammedans, and have raised themselves infinitely 
in the process ; and the very name of Salt-water 
Mohammedans given to those tribes along the coast 
who, from admixture with European settlers, have 
relaxed the severity of the Prophet's laws, is a striking 
proof of the extent to which the stricter form of the 
faith prevails in the far interior. 

It is melancholy to contrast with these wide-spread 
beneficial influences of IMohammedanism, the little 
that has been done for Africa till very lately by the 
Christian nations that have settled in it, and the still 
narrower limits within which it has been confined. Till 
a few years ago the good effects produced beyond the 
immediate territories occupied by them were abso- 
lutely nothing. The achievement of Vasco de Gama, 
for which Te Deums were sung in Europe, proved for 
centuries to be nothing but the direst curse to Africa. 
If the Oceanic slave trade has been, to the eternal 
credit of England in particular, at last abolished by 
Christian nations, it cannot be forgotten that Africa 
owes also to them its origin, and on the West Coast, 
at all events, its long continuance. The message that 
European traders have carried for centuries to Africa 
has been one of rapacity, of cruelty, and of bad 



38 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

faith. It is a remark of Dr. Livingstone's^ that the 
only art that the natives of Africa have acquired from 
their 500 years' acquaintance with the Portuguese, 
has been the art of distiUing spirits from a gun-barrel ; 
and that the only permanent belief they owe to them 
is the belief that man may sell his brother man ; for 
this, he says emphatically, is not a native belief, but 
is only to be found in the track of the Portuguese. 
The stopping of the Oceanic slave trade by England 
is an enormous benefit to Africa ; but, if we except 
the small number of converts made within the limits 
of their settlements, it has been the only benefit con- 
ferred by Europeans. The extension of African 
commerce is of more than doubtful benefit at present. 
The chief articles that we export from thence are the 
produce of slave labour, and, what is worse, of a vastly 
extended slave trade, in the inaccessible interior.^ 

Nor is it wholly without reason that in spite of 
Krapf and Moffat, of Baker, of Frere, and of Living- 
stone, and ofa score of other single-hearted and energetic 



' Livingstone's * Expedition to the Zambesi,' page 240. 

2 For the introduction, or rather the invention, of the Slave Trade 
by the Portuguese in the year 1444, see Helps' * Spanish Conquest in 
America,' I. 35 sq.; and the quotation there given from the Chronicle 
of Azurara, relating the capture of 200 Africans by a Portuguese 
company at Lagos, and their shipment to Portugal. A disastrous pre- 
cedent from that time down to the end of the last century, only too 
fatally followed by all the Christian nations of Europe which had the 
chance ! 



WHAT HAVE CHRISTIANS DONE IN AFRICA? 39 

philanthropists, the white man is still an object of 
terror, and his professed creed an object of suspicion and 
repugnance, to the negro race. Truly, if the question 
must be put, whether it is Mohammedan or Christian 
nations that have as yet done most for Africa, the 
answer must be that it is not the Christian. And if it 
be asked, again, not what religion is the purest in 
itself, and ideally the best, for to this there could 
be but one answer ; but which, under the peculiar 
circumstances, historical, geographical, and ethnolo- 
gical, is the religion most likely to get hold on a vast 
scale of the native mind, and so in some measure to 
elevate the savage character, the same answer must 
be returned. The question is, indeed, already half 
answered by a glance at the map of Africa. Moham- 
medanism has already leavened almost the whole of 
Africa to within five degrees of the Equator ; and, to 
the south of it, Uganda, the most civilised state in that 
part of Central Africa, has just become Mohammedan.^ 

^ See some interesting remarks by Mr. Francis Galton at a meeting of 
the British Association at Leeds, on Sept. 22, 1873. I have also to 
thank him for giving me, in conversation, his experience of Mohammedan- 
ism in Africa, and for directing me to the best authorities on the subject. 
Along the coast -line Mohammedanism of a degraded kind has of course 
extended much further South, beyond Zanzibar to Mozambique and the 
Portuguese colonies. There are Mohammedans to be found even among 
the Kaffirs and in Madagascar. The original Portuguese settlers found 
the Arabs established along the coasts of Mozambique and in the interior. 
They exterminated the former ; but as they failed to dispossess the latter, 
it is possible that some of the terra incognita in the interior may be still 
Mohammedan. 



40 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Last year, a Mosque was built on the shores of the 
Victoria Nyanza itself, and the Nile, from its source 
to its mouth, is now, with very few exceptions, a 
Mohammedan river. 

That Mohammedanism may, when mutual mis- 
understandings are removed, as I hope to show in a 
future Lecture, be elevated, chastened, purified by 
Christian influences and a Christian spirit, and that 
evils such as the slave trade, which are really foreign 
to its nature, can be put down by the heroic efforts of 
Christian philanthropists, I do not doubt ; and Lean, 
therefore, look forward, if with something of anxiety, 
with still more of hope, to what seems the destiny of 
Africa, that Paganism and Devil-worship will die out, 
and that the main part of the continent, if it cannot 
become Christian, will become, what is rext best to 
it, Mohammedan. 

Anyhow, it is certain that the gains of Moham- 
medanism, in Africa alone, counterbalance its apparent 
losses from Russian conquests, and from Proselytism 
everywhere else ; nor can I believe, notwithstanding 
predictions inspired by the wish, that its work is yet 
done, or nearly done, in any of the countries that have 
ever owned its sway. 

I speak of the apparent losses from Russian con- 
quest, for the onward march of the Russian Colossus 
through Central Asia, so far from carrying any form 



REVIVAL IN ARMENIA 41 

of Christianity with it, seems to intensify the religious 
convictions of the half-conquered or threatened races. 
What was dead in the religion before, it revives ; to what 
was only half-alive, it gives fresh vigour. Islam has 
now become with them a patriotism as well as a creed ; 
and Mr. Gifford Palgrave, an able and accurate observer, 
has lately described how the distinctive precepts of 
the Mohammedan religion — those enjoining the observ- 
ance of the month of Ramadhan, the reading of the 
Koran, the pilgrimage of the Hadj, the abstinence from 
gaming, from tobacco, and from intoxicating drinks — 
are now much more rigidly observed in the debateable 
territories ; and, more than this, the Abkhasians with 
their immemorial antiquity, and the heroic Circassians 
driven from their homes after a desperate struggle by 
Muscovite oppression and bad faith, dropping such 
traces of Christianity as they had, but carrying with 
them a legacy of immortal hate to the creed and 
country of their tyrants, have crossed the frontier of 
the more liberal Turkish Empire, and coalescing with 
Koords, Turkomans, and Arabs, have settled down in 
the uplands of Armenia, and are there forming the 
nucleus of a new, and vigorous, and united Mahom- 
medan nation.^ 

In India, where the two religions are brought face 
to face, and where, if anywhere, we may expect the 

* Palgrave's 'Essays on Eastern Questions,' iv. and v. 



42 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

great drama to play itself out, Mohammedanism gives 
no sign of yielding. Unlike Brahmanism, which the 
thousand influences of Western civilisation are sapping 
in every direction, Mohammedanism, on the contrary, 
seems to concentrate the strength it already has, and 
owing to the efforts of its zealous missionaries, is 
giving symptoms at once of a Revival and of a Reform 
that may, at any time, change the religious destinies of 
the country. The Faithful are as courageous, as sincere, 
as ardently monotheistic as they ever were ; witness 
it the Indian Mutiny, the Wahhabee Revival, and the 
last terrible argument of assassination. The heroism 
and self-devotion of our missionaries seems to be 
wasted on them in vain, and except in individual 
cases I see no sign that it v/ill ever be otherwise. 
Buddhism and Brahmanism may be driven out of 
India, but Mohammedanism never, except by the 
Mohammedan method of the sword.^ 

Such are the leading facts of Mohammedanism 
viewed from the outside ; and now how are we to 
account for them t 

One thing is certain, that the explanations so 
readily offered by historians and Christian apologists 
till within a very recent period will not suffice now. 
People who think they have nothing to do with 
a system except to attack it, are not those who can 

^ See Appendix to this Lecture. 



ISLAM IN INDIA 43 

best explain the causes of its vitality or its success. 
One historian tells us that Mohammedanism triumphed 
by the mere force of arms ; another, by the use Moham- 
med made of the tendency so deeply planted in man 
to fail victims in masses to any well-conceived im- 
posture ; a third traces his success to his skilful 
plagiarisms from faiths purer than his own ; and a 
fourth to the elevated morality, or to the lax 
morality, inculcated in the Koran ; for both of these 
are strangely enough urged almost in the same 
breath by the same people : while, lastly, others dwell 
on the inherent strength of the founder's character 
and the enthusiasm that must accompany a crusade 
against idolatry.^ We feel that most of these have 
some truth in them, some of them have much ; and one 
or two of them are not only not true, but they are the 
very reverse of the truth. But we also feel that none 
of them singly, nor all of them together, adequately 
account for the phenomena they profess to explain. 

In treating of Mohammedanism, as remarked by 
M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire,^ we have to try in limine 
to discard alike our national and our religious preju- 
dices. It was not till Mohammedanism had existed 
for eight hundred years that it was possible to discard 
the one ; and not till very lately that it was even 

* See some of these explanations admirably dealt with by F. D. 
Maurice, 'Religions of the World,' Lecture I. 
' Mahomet et le Koran, preface, p. 6. 



44 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

attempted to discard the other. Since the conquest 
of Constantinople, or rather since the brilliant naval 
victory of Don John of Austria at Lepanto, and its 
final repulse by John Sobieski from the walls of 
Vienna two hundred and thirty years later, Moham- 
medanism has ceased, in Europe at least, to be an 
aggressive and conquering power ; and since then, it 
has been possible for the states of Christendom to 
breathe more freely, and to forget the infidel in the 
ally or the subject. 

Religious prejudice is more difficult to overcome. 
Men who are ardently attached to their own religion 
find it difficult to judge another dispassionately, and 
from a neutral point of view. The philosopher who, 
according to Gibbon's famous aphorism, looked upon 
all religions of the Roman Empire as equally false, 
and the magistrate who looked upon all as equally 
useful, would be alike incapacitated for viewing the 
Mussulman creed from the Mussulman stand-point. 
Perhaps the populace who looked upon all religions as 
equally true would have been the best judges of the 
three ; but I doubt whether in this, as in most 
epigrammatic sentences, something of truth has not 
been sacrificed to the antithesis. Nature does not 
arrange herself in antithetical groups for our conveni- 
ence ; and I doubt whether the mass of any people, at 
any time, have looked upon all religions as equally true. 



NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS PREJUDICES 45 

But the comparative study of religion is beginning 
to teach, at all events, the more thoughtful of man- 
kind, not indeed that all religions are equally true or 
equally elevating, but that all contain some truth ; 
that no religion is exclusively good, none exclusively 
bad ; that any religion which has a real and continued 
hold on a large body of mankind must satisfy a 
real spiritual need, and is so far good. God is in all 
His works, and not the least so in the thoughts 
and aspirations of His creatures towards Himself; 
and what we have to do is to feel after Him in 
each and all, assured that He is there, even if haply 
in our ignorance we can find no trace of Him. 

Truly, when we are dealing with religion at all, 
even though it be Polytheism or Fetishism, we are 
* treading upon holy ground,' and in order that we 
may treat that creed, sublime in its simplicity, which is 
our special subject, with that union of candour and 
of reverence which alone befits it, it is necessary 
before concluding this introductory Lecture that I 
should lay down clearly one principle which must 
guide us in our investigation. 

It is this, that for the purposes of scientific in- 
vestigation, religions must be regarded as differing 
from one another in degree rather than in kind. 
This is the one postulate, itself the result of a 
careful induction, upon which alone the existence 



46 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

of any true science of religion must depend. Without 
a clear perception of this truth you enter upon the 
study of the religions of the world, with a precon- 
ceived idea, which will colour all your conclusions, 
and will invalidate them the more gravely, the more 
favourable those conclusions are to your own creed. 
The ordinary distinctions of kind, therefore, drawn 
between true and false, natural and supernatural, 
revealed and unrevealed religions are, for our present 
purpose, unreal and misleading. The fact is, that 
from one point of view all religions are more or 
less natural, from another all are more or less super- 
natural ; and all alike are to be treated from the same 
stand-point, and investigated by the same methods. 
In the Science of Religion, to quote an expression 
of Max Miiller's used in this place, Christianity ' owns 
no prescriptive rights, and claims no immunities.' It 
challenges the freest inquiry ; and as it claims to 
come from God Himself, so it fears not the honest 
use of any faculties that God has given to man. Chris- 
tianity is indeed a revelation, and what it really reveals 
is true ; and, so far, if the alternative must needs be 
put in this shape, no Christian would have any doubt 
in which category to place his own creed. 

But does Christianity claim any such monopoly of 
what is good and true as is implied in this crude classifi- 
cation, or will any one say that there is no real revela- 



DO RELIGIONS DIFFER IN KIND? 47 

tion of God in the noble lives of Confucius or Buddha, 
and no fragments of Divine truth in the pure morality 
of the systems which they founded ? Truth, happily 
for man, is myriad-sided, and happy he who can catch 
a far-off glance of the one side of it presented to him ! 
Claim, if you like, for the Bible what the Koran does 
claim for itself and the Bible does not — a rigid or a 
verbal inspiration. Grant that the truth revealed 
passed mechanically through the mind of the sacred 
writer without contamination and without alloy, yet 
who can say that since the Verities with which re- 
ligion deals are all beyond the world of sense, the 
precise meaning attached by him to any one word in 
his creed is the same as that attached to it by 
any other ? — qiwt homines tot sententicB. The recipient 
subject colours every object of sensation or of thought 
as it passes into it, and is conscious of that object, 
not as it entered, but as it has been instantaneously 
and unconsciously transformed in the alembic of the 
mind. In religion, as in external nature, the human 
mind is, as Bacon says, an unequal mirror to the rays 
of things, mixing its ov/n nature indissolubly with 
theirs. And this relative element once admitted into 
religion at all, it follows that to divide religions by an 
impassable barrier into true and false, natural and 
revealed, is like dividing music into sacred and secular, 
and history into sacred and profane. It is a division 



48 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

convenient enough for those — the majority of the 
human race — who are content with an artificial classifi- 
cation, and who care for no religion but their own ; 
but, for scientific purposes, it is a cross division, it 
begs the question at issue, and is as unphilosophical 
as it is misleading.^ 

Nor do Sacred Books, whatever be the theory of 
inspiration on which they rest, lend to the religion to 
which they belong any distinction of kind ; they fix 
the phraseology of a religion, and we are apt to 
believe that they also fix the thought. They do not 
do so, however. The 'poetic and literary terms 
thrown out,'^ to use Mr. Matthew Arnold's happy 
expression, by the highest minds at the highest 
objects of thought, as faint approximations only to 
the truth respecting them, become enshrined in the 
Sacred Canon. They are misunderstood, or half un- 
derstood, even by those who hear them from the 
Psalmist's or the Prophet's own lips, and in a few 
years the misunderstanding grows till they become 
fixed and rigid.^ Poetic imagery is mistaken for 
scientific exactness, and dim outlines for exhaustive 
definitions. A virtue is attached to the words them- 

^ For a full discussion of the ordinary methods of classifying religion, 
see Max Miiller's 'Science of Religion,' pp. 123-143. 

2 ' Literature and Dogma,' passim: but see especially pp. 38-41 and 58. 

^ For admirable illustrations of this, see * Literature and Dogma, ' 
cap. II. and V. p. 123. This part of Mr. Arnold's work, it may be 
pretty confidently asserted, is done once for all; and its influence will 
be felt, avowedly or not, throughout the domain of Biblical criticism. 



INFLUENCE OF SACRED BOOKS 49 

selves, and the thought, which is the jewel, is hidden 
by the letter, which is only the casket. If it be true 
that man never knows how anthropomorphic he him- 
self is, still less do sacred writers know the anthropo- 
morphism and the materialism which will eventually 
be drawn even from their highest and most spiritual 
utterances. How little did the author of the prayer 
at the dedication of the temple of Solomon — the 
grandest assertion, perhaps, in the Old Testament of 
the infinite power and the infinite goodness of God, 
His nearness to us and His distance from us — imagine 
that the time would ever come when it would be held 
that in that temple alone, and by Jews alone, men 
could worship the Father ! 

Christians may and must rise from an impartial 
study of the religions of the world with their belief 
vastly deepened that their Sacred Books stand as a 
whole on a far higher level than other Sacred Books, 
and that the ideal life of Christianity, while it is 
capable of including the highest ideals of other creeds, 
cannot itself be attained by any one of them. But the 
value of this belief will be exactly proportioned to the 
extent to which they have been able, for the purposes 
of scientific study, to divest themselves of any arbi- 
trary assumption in the matter ; and they must also 
acknowledge that it is possible and natural for sincere 
Mohammedans or Buddhists to arrive at the same 

E 



50 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

conclusions concerning their own faiths. It is not easy 
to be thoroughly convinced of this, or to act upon it ; 
for intolerance is the ' natural weed of the human 
bosom,' and there is no religion which does not seem 
superstitious to those who do not believe in it.^ 

But this belief is far from necessitating in practical 
life a religious indifference, nor, however it may seem so 
at first sight, is it averse to all missionary efforts. Mis- 
sionaries will not cease to exist, nor will they lose their 
energy, their enthusiasm, and their self-sacrifice. But 
they will go to work in a different way, will view other 
religions in a different light, and will test their success 
by a different standard. They will no doubt be forced 
to acquiesce in what seems the will of Providence, that 
a national religion is as much a part of man's nature 
as is the genius of his language, or the colour of his 
skin ; they will admit that the precise form of a creed 
is a matter of prejudice and of circumstance with most 
of us, and that, in spite of the rise of historical reli- 
gions which have shattered other faiths and risen upon 
their ruins, nine-tenths of the whole human race have 
died, and will in all probability continue to die, in the 
profession of that faith into which they were born ; 
but this will no longer seem to them, as it must seem 

^ See Grote, VI. p. 156, sq., on the death of Socrates. The boast 
of Cicero, * Majores nostri superstitionem a rehgione separaverunt ' (de 
Nat. Deomm, II. 28), is the natural belief of every one, even of the 
Fetish-worshipper, concerning his own, and none but his own, creed. 



MISSIONARY WORK 51 

now, a mysterious and overwhelming victory of evil 
over good, which appals the moral sense, and, if a man 
be not better than the letter of his creed, must tend to 
shake at once his belief in the Universal Fatherhood 
of God, and the true brotherhood of humanity ; they 
will rather, in proportion to the strength of their belief 
in the goodness of God, believe that His creatures can- 
not grope after Him, even in the dark, without getting 
that light which is sufficient for them ; they will not 
seek to eradicate wholly any existing national faith, 
if only it be a living one ; nor, as the phrase is, will 
they aim at ' bringing its adherents over to Christia- 
nity ; ' they will seek rather to bring Christianity to 
them, to infuse a Christian spirit into what is, at worst, 
not an anti-Christian, but merely a non-Christian, or, 
it may be, a half-Christian faith. 

The Apostles did not cease to be Jews because 
they became Christians, or to look up to Moses less 
because they reverenced Christ more. And yet the 
difference between Judaism and Christianity, between 
the forms and the ceremonies and the exclusiveness of 
the one, and the spirituality and the freedom and the 
universality of the other, is at least as great, as I hope 
to show, as the difference between a sincere believer 
in the teaching of the prophet of Arabia and a humble 
follower of the character of Christ. 

St. Paul, the one model given us in the New 

E 2 



52 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Testament of what a missionary should be, in dealing 
with the faith of a cultivated people much dissimilar 
to his own, a faith, most people would say now, differ- 
ing in kind as well as in degree from Christianity, 
never thought himself of drawing so broad a distinc- 
tion between the two. He might well have been 
disposed to do so, for the Polytheism of Athens had 
long ceased to be an adequate expression of the 
highest religious life of the people. It was in its 
decadence even when it had inspired the profoundest 
utterances of iEschylus or Sophocles ; it could not have 
inspired them then, even had there existed genius like 
theirs to be inspired. Its oracles were dumb ; and yet 
St. Paul dropped not a word of scorn for the echoes 
that still lingered, and the flames that were still 
flickering, on its shattered altars. He did not talk of 
false gods or of devil-worship, of imposture or of super- 
stition. Those whom our translation calls * super- 
stitious ' he calls ' God-fearing.' He quotes their great 
authors with sympathy and with respect. He pro- 
fesses only to give articulate utterance to their own 
thoughts, and to declare more fully to them that God 
whom, unknowingly, they already worshipped. 

And so, again, in writing to the converts to be 
found even in the metropolis of the world, and, it must 
be added, the head -quarters of its vices, while he 
lashes its moral iniquities and its religious corruptions 



EXAMPLE OF ST. PAUL 53 

with an unsparing hand, yet, with a toleration wholly- 
alien to the Jewish race, and without forfeiting his 
supreme allegiance to his Master, he strikes at the 
root of the impassable distinction between revealed 
and unrevealed religion, by pointing out that those 
who, not having the law, yet did by nature the things 
contained in the law, were in truth a law unto them- 
selves. He showed that the Eternal could reveal 
Himself as well by His unwritten as by His written 
law, and that the voice of conscience is, in very truth, 
to everyone who follows it, the voice of the living God. 
The missionaries of the future, therefore, will try 
to penetrate to the common elements which, they will 
have learnt, underlie all religions alike, and make the 
most of those. They will be able, with a sympathy 
which is real because it is drawn from a knowledge of \ 

the history of their own faith, to point out the abuses 
which have crept, and always will creep, into an origi- 
nally spiritual creed. They will inculcate in their 
teaching, and exhibit in their lives, as they do now, 
something of that highest morality which they have 
learned from their Master, and which they will then 
have learned is the very essence of their faith, and 
which, in its broad outlines at least, in the 'secret' 
as well as in the 'method' of Jesus,^ may adapt itself 
to the wants of every nation and every creed. 

* 'Literature and Dogma,' p. 343. 'Of the all-importance of righteous- 



54 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

They will never, therefore, think it necessary to 
present Christianity to those of an alien creed as a 
collection of defined yet mysterious doctrines which 
must be accepted whole or not at all, but will rather 
be content to show them Christ Himself as He ap- 
peared to His earliest disciples — before the mists of 
metaphysics had gathered round His head, and the 
watchwords of theology had half hidden Him from the 
view — glorious in His moral beauty, sublime in His 
self-surrender, Divine in His humanity and by reason of 
it. And they may then leave it to the moral sense of 
some, at least, in every section of the race whose greatest 
glory and Ideal Representative He is, to judge of Him 
aright, and to recognise in His person the supreme 
and the final Revelation of God. Here, in the am- 
bition to set before the eyes of all a higher Ideal, 
and a more perfect example than any they have yet 
known ; in the proclamation of the truth, which 
Christ came to proclaim, of the universal Father- 
hood, and the perfect love of God — here is ample 



ness there is a knowledge in Mohammedanism, but of the method and 
secret of Jesus, by which alone is righteousness possible, hardly any 
sense at all.' There is substantial truth in this ; but few can read Mr. 
Arnold's own account of what he conceives the secret and method of 
Jesus to have been, without feeling that all the higher religions of the 
world, — any religion, in fact, which controlling the lower part of man's 
nature and stimulating the higher, makes him to be at peace with him- 
self, which gives hope in adversity, and calmness in the prospect of 
death, must contain much both of the one and of the other. 



HOW MAY CHRISTIANITY SPREAD? 55 

work for , the enthusiasm of humanity ; in this sense 
Christ may Hve again upon the earth, and in this 
sense, and only in this, is it Hkely that Christianity 
will overspread the world. I have premised this much, 
even at the risk of anticipating some of the con- 
clusions to which we shall, I believe, ultimately come, 
because I think it necessary to prevent any misunder- 
standing as to my point of view. 

gf oioov oioz ; how far the way was prepared for 
Mohammed by circumstances, and what part he him- 
self bcre in the great revolution that goes by his name ; 
what we are to say on the nature of his mission, on 
the much-disputed question of his sincerity, of the 
inconsistencies in his career and the blots upon it, 
this will form the subject of my next Lecture. 



^ 



56 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 



LECTUEE II. 



February 21, 1874. 



MOHAMMED. 

MfyaXwj^ tavTov d^Lul at,icg wv. — Aristotle. 

There goeth the son of Abdallah, who hath his conversation 
in the heavens. — The Koreishites. 

A COMPLETE history of the opinions that have been 
held by Christians about Mohammed and Moham- 
medanism would not be an uninstructive chapter, how- 
ever melancholy, in the history of the human mind. 
To glance for a moment at a few of them. 

During the first few centuries of Mohammedanism, 
Christendom could not afford to criticise or explain ; 
it could only tremble and obey. But when the 
Saracens had received their first check in the heart of 
France, the nations which had been flying before them, 
faced round, as a herd of cows will sometimes do when 
the single dog that has put them to flight is called 
off; and though they did not yet venture to fight, 
they could at least calumniate their retreating foe. 



MEDIAEVAL VIEW OF MOHAMMED 57 

Drances-like, they could manufacture calumnies and 
victories at pleasure : — 

* Qu;5e tuto tibi magna volant; dum distinct hostem 
Agger murorum, nee inundant sanguine fossae,' 

The disastrous retreat of Charles the Great through 
Roncesvalles is turned by Romance mongers and 
Troubadours into a signal victory ; Charles, who 
never went beyond Pannonia, is credited, in the follow- 
ing century, with a successful Crusade to the Holy 
Sepulchre, and even with the sack of Babylon ! 
The age of Christian chivalry had not yet come, and 
was not to come for two hundred years. 

In the romance of ' Turpin,' quoted by Renan, 
Mohammed, the fanatical destroyer of all idolatry, is 
turned himself into an idol of gold, and, under the 
name of Mawmet, is reported to be the object of 
worship at Cadiz ; and this not even Charles the 
Great, Charles the Iconoclast, the destroyer of the 
Irmansul, in his own native Germany, would venture 
to attack from fear of the legion of demons which 
guarded it. In the song of Roland, the national Epic 
of France, referring to the same events, Mohammed 
appears with the chief of the Pagan Gods on the one 
side of him and the chief of the Devils on the other ; 
a curious anticipation, perhaps, of the view of Satanic 
inspiration taken by Sir William Muir. Marsilles, 



58 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Kaliph of Cordova, is supposed to worship him as a 
god, and his favourite form of adjuration is made to be 
* By Jupiter, by Mohammed, and by Apollyon,' — 
strange metamorphosis and strange collocation ! 
Human sacrifices are offered to him, if nowhere else 
indeed, in the imagination and assertions of Christian 
writers of the tenth and eleventh centuries, under the 
various names of Bafum, or Maphomet, or Mawmet ; 
and in the same spirit Malaterra, in his ' History of 
Sicily,' describes that island as being, when under 
Saracenic rule, ' a land wholly given to idolatry,' ^ and 
the expedition of the Norman Roger Guiscard is 
characterised as being a crusade against idolatry. 
Which people were the greater idolaters, any candid 
reader of the Italian annalists of this time, collected 
by Muratori, can say. It is not a little curious that 
both the English and French languages still bear wit- 
ness to the popular misapprehension ; the French by 
the word 'Mahomerie ' ; the English by the word * mum- 
mery,' still used for absurd or superstitious rites.^ 
Nor has a Mohammedan nothing to complain of in 
the etymology and history, little known or forgotten, 
of the words ' Mammetry ' ^ and ' Paynim/ ' terma- 

^ B. II. I. 'Terram idolis deditam.' 
' Renan, ' Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse/ p. 223, note. 
^ Mammetry, a contraction of Mahometry, used in early English 
for any false religion, especially for a worship of idols, insomuch that 



MISCONCEPTIONS SHOIVN BY LANGUAGE 59 

gant' and 'miscreant' ; but to these I can only refer 
in passing. 

In the twelfth century * the god Mawmet passes 
into the heresiarch Mahomet,'^ and, as such, of course 
he occupies a conspicuous place in the * Inferno.' 
Dante places him in his ninth circle among the 
sowers of religious discord ; his companions being Fra 
Dolcino, a communist of the fourteenth century, and 
Bertrand de Born, a fighting Troubadour : his flesh 
is torn piecemeal from his limbs by demons who 
repeat their round in time to re-open the half-healed 
wounds. The romances of Baphomet, so common in 
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, attribute any 
and every crime to him, just as the Athanasians did 
to Arius. * He is a debauchee, a camel stealer, a 
Cardinal, who having failed to obtain the object of 
every Cardinal's ambition, invents a new religion to 
revenge himself on his brethren ! ' ^ 

With the leaderG of the Reformation, Moham- 

Mammet or Ma\ATnet came to mean an idol. In Shakespeare the 
name is extended to mean a doll : Juliet, for instance, is called by her 
father ' a whining mammet. ' See Trench ' On Words, 'p. 112. Paynim = 
Pagan or Heathen. Termagant, a term applied now only to a brawling 
woman, was originally one of the names given to the supposed idol of 
the Mohammedans. Miscreant, originally ' a man who believes 
otherwise,' acquired its moral significance from the hatred of the 
Saracens which accompanied the Crusades. The story of Blue Beard, 
the associations connected with the name 'Mahound,' and the dislike 
of European chivalry in Medi£eval times for the Mare — the favourite 
animal of the Arabs — are other indications of the same thing. 
^ Renan, loc. cit. - Renan, p. 224. 



6o MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

med, the greatest of all Reformers, meets with little 
sympathy, and their hatred of him, as perhaps was 
natural, seems to vary inversely as their knowledge. 
Luther doubts whether he is not worse than Leo ; 
Melancthon believes him to be either Gog or Magog, 
and probably both.^ The Reformers did not see that 
the Papal party, fastening on the hatred of priestcraft 
and formalism which was common doubtless to Islam 
and to Protestantism, would impute to both a com- 
mon hatred of Christianity, even as the Popes had 
accused the iconoclastic Emperors of Constantinople 
eight centuries before. 

Now, too, arose the invention, the maliciousness of 
which was only equalled by its stupidity, but be- 
lieved by all who wished to believe it — of the dove 
trained to gather peas placed in the ear of Mohammed,^ 
that people might believe that he was inspired by the 
Holy Ghost — inspired, it would seem, by the very 
Being, whose separate existence it was the first article 
of his creed to deny ! In the imagination of Biblical 
commentators later on, and down to this very day, 
he divides with the Pope the credit or discredit of 
being the subject of special prophecy in the books 
of Daniel and the Revelation, that magnificent 

^ See 'Quarterly Review,' Art. Islam, byDeutsch, No. 254, p. 296, 
2 A similar story is told of the great Schamyl; only in this case it is 

Mohammed himself who takes the fonn of a dove, and imparts his 

commands to the Hero. 



SUPPOSED SUBJECl OF PROPHECY 6i 

series of tableaux, a part of which, on the prin- 
ciple that * a prophecy may mean whatever comes 
after it,' has been tortured into agreement with each 
successive act of the drama of history ; while, from 
another part, lovers of the mysterious have attempted 
to cast, and, in spite of disappointment will always 
continue to cast, the horoscope of the future. He is 
Antichrist, the Man of Sin, the Little Horn, and I 
know not what besides ; nor do I think that a single 
writer, with the one strange exception of the Jew 
Maimonides, till towards the middle of the eighteenth 
century, treats of him as otherwise than a rank im- 
postor and false prophet. 

France and England may, perhaps, divide the 
credit of having been the first to take a different view, 
and to have begun that critical study of Arabian his- 
tory or literature which, in the hands of Gibbon and 
of Muir, of Caussin de Perceval and of St. Hilaire, of 
Weil and of Sprenger, has put the materials for a fair 
and unbiassed judgment within the reach of every- 
one. Most other writers of the i8th century, such 
as Dean Prideaux and the Abbe Maracci, Boulain- 
villiers and Voltaire, and some subsequent Bampton 
lecturers and Arabic professors, have approached the 
subject only to prove a thesis. Mohammed was to be 
either a hero or an impostor; they have held a brief 
either for the prosecution or the defence ; and from 



62 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

them, therefore, we learn much that has been said 
about Mohammed, but comparatively little of Mo- 
hammed himself. 

The founder of the reaction \vas Gagnier, a 
Frenchman by birth, but an Englishman by adop- 
tion. Educated in Navarre, where he had early 
shown a mastery of more than one Semitic lan- 
guage, he became Canon of St. Genevieve at Paris ; 
on a sudden he turned Protestant, came to England, 
and attacked Catholicism with all the zeal of a recent 
convert. Having been appointed to the Chair of 
Arabic at Oxford, he proceeded to write a history 
of Mohammed, founded on the work of Abul Feda, 
the qarliest and most authentic of Arabic historians 
then known. 

The translations of the Koran into two different 
European languages by Sale and Savary soon fol- 
lowed ; and from these works, combined with the vast 
number of facts contained in Sale's Introductory Dis- 
course, Gibbon, who was not an Arabic scholar him- 
self, drew the materials for his splendid chapter, the 
most masterly of his 'three master-pieces of biography,' 
Athanasius, Julian, and Mohammed. * He has de- 
scended on the subject in the fulness of his strength,* 
has been inspired by it, and has produced a sketch 
which, in spite of occasional uncalled-for sarcasms 
and characteristic innuendoes, must be the delight 



REACTION IN HIS FAVOUR 63 

and the despair even of those who have access, 
as we now have, thanks especially to Sprenger 
and Muir, to vast stores of information denied 
to him. But Gibbon's unfair and unphilosophic 
treatment of Christianity has, perhaps, prevented the 
world from doing justice to his generally fair and 
philosophic treatment of Mohammedanism ; and, as 
a consequence of this, most Englishmen, who do not 
condemn the Arabian prophet unheard, derive what 
favourable notions of him they have, not from 
Gibbon, but from Carlyle. Make as large deductions 
as we will on the score of Carlyle's peculiar views on 
*■ Heroes and Hero-worship,' how many of us can recall 
the shock of surprise, the epoch in our intellectual and 
religious life, when we found that he chose for his 
* Hero as prophet,' not Moses, or Elijah, or Isaiah, but 
the so-called impostor Mohammed ! 

I admitted above that_the religionof Moharn- 
med was m its e ssence not orig inal. Mohammed 
n ever said it was : he called it a revival of the old one, 
a return to the primitive creed of Abraham ; and there 
is reason to believe that both the great religions of the 
Eastern world existing in his time, Sabseanism, that is, 
and Magianism, had been, in their origin^ at least, 
vaguely monotheistic. They had passed through the 
inevitable stages of spirituality, misunderstanding, 
decline, and, lastly, intentional corruption, till the 



64 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

God whom Abraham, according to the well-known 
Mussulman legend, had been the first to worship, 
because, while He had made the stars and sun to 
rise and set. He never rose nor set Himself, had with- 
drawn behind them altogether ; the heavenly bodies, 
from being symbols, had become the thing sym- 
bolised ; temples were erected in their honour, and 
idols filled the temples. 

And as with Sabaeanism, so with Magianism ; 
Ormuzd and Ahriman were no longer the principles 
brought into existence, or existing, by the permission 
of the one true God, who, as Zoroaster had taught, 
would tolerate neither temples, nor altars, nor symbols ; 
worshipped only on the hill-tops with the eye of faith, 
quickened though it might be by the glory of the 
rising or setting sun presented to the bodily eye. 
Fire had itself become the Divinity ; and what offering 
could be more acceptable to such a God, than the 
human victim, overwhelmed by the mysterious flame, 
whose divine power he denied .-* 

And, combined with these two religions which had 
been spiritual in their origin, and, probably, more 
prominent and popular than either, was the grossest 
Fetishism, the worship of actual stocks and stones, 
or of the * grim array ' of three hundred and sixty 
idols in the Kaaba ; among which the aerolite once 
believed to have been of dazzling whiteness, but long 



PREVIOUS RELIGIONS IN ARABIA 65 

since blackened by the kisses of sinful men, was at 
once the most ancient and the most sacred. 

Nor were Judaism and Christianity themselves un- 
known in Arabia. The destruction of Jerusalem by 
Titus had caused a very general migration of Jews from 
Palestine, southwards and eastwards, beyond the limits 
of the Roman Empire, and, from that time onwards, 
the northern part of Arabia was dotted over by Jewish 
colonies. In the third century a whole Arabian tribe, 
even in the south of the Peninsula, had adopted the 
Jewish faith, and the history of Mohammed proves 
that the neighbourhood of Yathrib^ contained many 
Jewish tribes, which, though they maintained in the 
land of their exile that proud religious isolation which 
was their national birthright, were not without their 
influence on Arab politics. 

As to Christianity, it is possible that the very first 
converts made by St. Paul to the faith which once 
he had destroyed, were of Arab blood.^ In the fourth 
century we hear of Christian churches at Tzafar and at 
Aden, under the protection of the half-Christianised 
Himyarite king ; and the Abyssinian conquest made 
a form of Christianity to be the dominant religion, at 
all events in appearance, in Yemen. But neither of 

' Not called Medina, z.^. Medinat-an-Nabi, 'the City of the Pro- 
phet,' till after the Hegira. 

2 Epistle to Galatians, i. 17. 



66 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

these religions ever struck deep root in the Arabian 
soil : either the people were not suited to them, or 
they were not suited to the people. They lived on, 
on sufferance only, till a faith, which to the Arabs 
should be the more living one, should sweep them 
away. 

Such were the religious conditions under which 
Mohammed had to work ; and what were the social 
conditions ? Arabia had from time immemorial been 
split up into a vast number of independent tribes, 
always at war with one another. The scanty suste- 
nance which an arid soil yielded they were fain to eke 
out by trading themselves, or by plundering others 
who conducted caravans along the sea coast of the 
Hedjaz, to exchange the spices and precious stones 
of India or of Hadramaut or of Yemen with the 
manufactures of Bozra and Damascus. Their hand 
was against every man, and every man's hand was 
against them ; and a prophecy is hardly needed 
to explain the fact, that an impenetrable country 
was never penetrated by foreign conquerors. Nor 
were they as uncivilised as has often been sup- 
posed. They were as passionately fond of poetry as 
they were of war and plunder. What the Olympic 
Games did for Greece in keeping up the national 
feeling, as distinct from tribal independence, in 
giving a brief cessation from hostilities, and acting 



ARAB POETRY AND CHIVALRY 67 

as a literary centre, that the annual fairs at Okatz 
and Mujanna were to Arabia. Here tribes made up 
their dissensions, exchanged prisoners of war, and, 
most important of all, competed with one another in 
extempore poetic contests. Even in the * times of 
ignorance,' each tribe produced its own poet-laureate ; 
and the most ready and the best saw his poem 
transcribed in letters of gold,^ or suspended on th^ 
wall of the entrance of the Kaaba, where it would be 
seen by every pilgrim wdio might visit the most sacred 
place in the country. There was a wild chivalry, too, 
about them, a contempt of danger and a sensibility of 
honour, which lends a charm to all we hear of their 
loves and their wars, their greed and their hospitality, 
their rapine and their revenge. The Bedouin has been 
the same in these respects in all ages. * Be good enough 
to take off that garment of yours,' says the Bedouin 
robber politely to his victim ; * it is wanted by my 
wife ; ' and the victim submits, with as good a grace as 
he can muster, to the somewhat unreasonable demands 
of a hypothetical lady. El Mutanabi, a poet, prophet, 
and ^yarrior, three hundred years after the Hegira, 
but who no doubt had his prototypes before it, was 

' Called Moallacat. Sprenger and Deutsch agree that this word' 
means not 'suspended,' but 'strung loosely together,' and question 
the truth of the story of the suspension in the ' Kaaba.' Some of these 
poems, as, for instance, that of the poet Labyd, still survive, and are a 
standing proof of the untaught poetic genius of the Arabs. 

F 2 



68 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

journeying with his son through a country infested by 
robbers, and proposed to seek a place of refuge for 
the night : * Art thou then that Mutanabi,' exclaimed 
his slave, * who wrote these lines, — 

* I am known to the night, and the wild and the steed, 
To the guest and the sword, to the paper and the reed ? ' 

The poet-warrior felt the stain like a wound, and 
throwing himself down to sleep where he then was, 
met his death at the hands of the robbers.' The pas- 
sion indeed for indiscriminate plunder had, before the 
time of Mohammed, so far given way to the growing 
love of commerce that a kind of Treuga Dei, or 
Truce of God, was observed, in theory at least, during 
four months of the year. But what the law forbade 
then, ex hypothesi it allowed at other times, and it is 
likely that the enforced abstention gave, at once, the 
zest of novelty and a clear conscience to the pur- 
veyors of the trade when the four months were 
over. 

Such, very briefly, was the condition of the Arabs 
when, to use an expression of Voltaire, quoted by 
Barthelemy St. Hilaire, 'The turn of Arabia' came ;^ 

* Burton's 'Pilgrimage to Mecca,' III. p. 60, where he tells this 
story and translates the Arabic lines. See the whole of chap. XXIV. 
for a graphic account drawn from personal observation of Bedouin 
knight errantry, and poetry, and generosity. 

"^ P. 211. See Cap. II., generally, for a description of Pre-Moham- 
medan Arabi.i. 



COULD ISLAM HA VE BEEN PREDICTED ? 69 

when the hour had already struck for the most com- 
plete, the most sudden, and the most extraordinary- 
revolution that has ever come over any nation upon 
earth. 

One of the most philosophical of historians has 
remarked that of all the revolutions which have had a 
permanent influence upon the civil history of man- 
kind, none could so little be anticipated by human 
prudence as that eflected by the religion of Arabia. 
And at first sight it must be confessed that the 
Science of History, if indeed there be such a science, 
is at a loss to find that sequence of cause and effect 
which it is the object and the test of all history, which 
is worthy of the name, to trace out. 

The Emperor Justinian, not the least shrewd of the 
Byzantine Emperors, who, some forty years before, 
had thought it necessary to protect his empire from 
every possible and from many impossible dangers, 
had neglected to erect a line of fortresses on the side 
of his empire which, in defiance of nature, really was 
the most vulnerable.^ ' By a precaution which in- 
spired the cowardice it foresaw,' he had erected a 
fortress even at Thermopylae, where the religio loci 
would rather have called for a Spartan rampart of 
three hundred men, if only they had been forth- 
coming. He had kept the Sclavonians out of Con- 

» Cf. Gibbon, Vol. V. 102-111. 



70 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

stantinople by one long wall, and the Russians out of 
the Crimea by another ; he had fortified Amida and 
Edessa against the fire-worshippers ; had built St. 
Catherine's half-monastery and half-fortress in the 
wilderness of Mount Sinai ; and had even taken pre- 
cautions against the savages of Ethiopia : but he 
had trusted to the six hundred miles of desert, which 
nature had interposed between him and a set of 
robber tribes, intent only on molesting one another. 
What hostile force could pass such an obstacle 1 

But we can see now, and Mohammed himself per- 
haps saw, that the ground was in many respects prepared 
for a great social and religious revolution. * It de- 
tracts nothing from the fame of a great man to show, 
so far as we can, how his success was possible.'' It is 
only another proof, if proof were wanting, that genius 
is little else than insight joined to sustained effort ; 
the eye sees what it brings with it the power of seeing ; 
and the great man differs from his contemporaries 
chiefly in this, that he can read the dark riddle of his 
time with an eye a few degrees less obscured than those 
around him. He is the greatest product of his age, but 
he is still its product, and he is only the father of the 
age that is to succeed in so far as he owns his paren- 
tage. He marches indeed in front of his age ; but his 
influence will be permanent or fleeting precisely so far 

1 M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire, 'Maliomet et le Koran,' p. 51. 



GREAT MEN AND THEIR INFLUENCE 71 

as he discerns the direction in which it would advance 
at a slower pace without him.^ When he tries to go 
beyond this, and to force the world out of its groove, 
to adopt hobbies of his own, then begins the region of 
the remote, the selfish, the personal ; in this the great 
man fails, and hence the commonplaces on the failure 
of greatness, and the greatness of failure, with which 
Ave are all familiar. * Perish my name,' said Danton, 
* but let the cause triumph ; '^ and personal failure of 
this kind is to the great man no failure at all, it is only 
another word for success. The truth is that greatness, 
so far as it is the truest greatness, rarely fails altogether 
of its object ; and that failure is great only when the 
end proposed is good, and the human means, though 
inadequate to its attainment, are yet a real advance 
towards it. 

It must be remembered therefore as regards what 
seems the sudden birth of the Arabian nation, fully 
armed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, that the 
annual resort to Mecca for purposes of trade, poetry, 
and religion, had pointed to the Holy City as to a 
possible metropolis ; and to the Koreishites, the 
hereditary guardians of the Kaaba, as the potential 

» Cf. Guizot's 'Lectures on Histor>^' Vol. III. Lect. XX.; and 
Mill's Review of them in 'Dissertations and Discussions,' II. 249, 
250. 

" A similar sajing is attributed to Cavour : ' Perish my name and 
memory, so that Italy be made a nation ! ' 



72 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

rulers of a future people ; while, as regards the new 
religion, there was the groundwork of Monotheism 
underlying all the abuses and corruption of Magianism 
and Sabseanism. There was also a class of people, 
called Hanyfs, who prided themselves on preserving 
the original creed of Abraham, and even his sacred 
books ; while Ibn Ishac,^ the earliest known historian 
of Islam, records a meeting of four or five among 
the Koreishites at which it was resolved to open a 
crusade against idolatry, and to seek for the original 
and only true faith ; and they straightway abandoned 

^ He died A.H. 15 1. His work has been preserved for us in the 
Sirat-er-racoul of Ibn-Hisham, who died in the year of the Hegira 
213. The fullest and most trustworthy historian, in the judgment of 
Muir and Sprenger, whose writings have come down to us is the Katib 
al Wakidy, or secretary of the historian Wakidy : died 207 A.H. The 
MS. was discovered by Sprenger at Cawnpore. Among other dis- 
coveries of Sprenger may be mentioned a portion of the biography of 
Mohammed by Tabari, who died A.H. 310, and a complete biographical 
dictionary, termed Igaba, of the companions of Mohammed, com- 
• piled by Ibn-Hidjr, in the fifth century, from writers, whose names 
he gives, of earlier and incontestable authority. It contains the 
biographies of some 8,000 people. And it may be hoped that the 
Government of India, which numbers among its subjects more than 
thirty million Mussulmans, may recognise, if they have not already 
done so, the imperial importance of publishing the three remain- 
ing folios of the work. Sprenger brought out one volume, but 
an order of the Court of Directors suspended the publication of the 
rest. See Sprenger, Preface, p. 12, where it may be observed how 
modestly he passes over his own great discoveries, and does not even 
allude to the slight shown it by the Directors. Learned and critical 
Mohammedans, it would seem, do not think so highly of Wakidy and 
his secretary as Muir and Sprenger do ; they prefer Ibn-Hisham. — 
See Muir, I. 77-105. 



PRE-MOHAMMEDANS 73 

their homes and spread over the world in the quest of 
this Holy Grail.^ 

Mohammedanism therefore is no real exception 
to the principle I have laid down above as to the 
origin of the Historical Religions of the world, though, 
at first sight, it may appear to be so. To Moham- 
med's own mind it is quite true that the theological 
element was the predominant and inspiring one, but 
Mohammed's mind itself was the outcome, at least 
as much as it was the cause, of the great revolution 
which goes by his name. There was a general social 
and religious upheaving at the head of which the 
Prophet placed himself, and which partly carried him 
on with it, partly he himself carried it on ; the train 
was already laid, and the spark from heaven was all 
that was needed to set the Arab world ablaze. In 
this sense it is perhaps true, as Renan has remarked 
and the Koran itself declares, that Mohammedan- 
ism was preached before the time of Mohammed ; 
but there were Mohammedans before Mohammed, 
only in the sense in which there were Zoroas- 
trians before Zoroaster, Lutherans before Luther, 
and Christians before Christ. Renan has him- 
self remarked elsewhere, though he seems to have 
forgotten it in dealing with Mohammedanism, that 

' Sprerger, p. 81. These four ' enquirers ' were Waraka, Othman, 
Abayd, and Zayd. 



74 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

the glory of a religion belongs to its founder, and not 
to his predecessors or to his successors.^ It is easy, he 
says himself, to try to awake faith, and it is easy to be 
possessed by it when once it has been awakened ; 
but it is not easy to inspire it. It is the grandest gift, 
' a veiy gift of God. 

But though, as I have said, the hour had come, 
the youth of Mohammed gave few signs that he was 
the man. The portents which ushered in his birth, 
and that attended his early youth, are the offspring 
of another country and of a later age. The celestial 
light that beamed in the sky and from his newly- 
opened eyes ; the Tigris overflowing its banks ; the 

* It seems to me, though I would speak with the utmost diffidence in 
venturing to dissent from the greatest European authority on the subject, 
that Sprenger errs in the same direction as Renan, when he says in his 
volume, published at Allahabad (p. 171), that Abu Bakr did more for 
the success of Islam than the Prophet himself; and again (p. 174), 
after enumerating all those who, merely from their vague Monotheism, he 
calls the predecessors of Mohammed, he says that even after Mohammed 
was acknowledged as the messenger of God, Omar had more influence 
on the development of the ■ Islam than Mohammed himself. ' The 
Islam is not the work of Mohammed ; it is not the doctrine of the 
impostor .... it is the offspring of the spirit of the time, and 

• the voice of the Arabic nation There is, however, no 

doubt that the impostor has defiled it by his immorality and perverseness 
of mind.' It is fair to say that this tone seems somewhat moderated, 
or even'altered in the author's subsequent and greater work. Cf., how- 
ever. Vol. II. 83-88, One is inclined to ask, if Islam was merely the 
spirit of the time, who proved himself best able to read that spirit ? Was 
it Abu Bakr and Omar, or was it Mohammed that produced the Koran ? 
And is it their personality, or his, which has stamped itself with inefface- 
able clearness for all time upon the Eastern world ? 



YOUTH OF MOHAMMED 75 

palace of Chosroes toppling over to the ground ; the 
sacred fire of Zoroaster, which had burned for one 
thousand years, suddenly extinguished ; the mules that 
talked, and the sheep that bowed to him, were un- 
known to the contemporaries of Mohammed, and 
Mohammed himself says nothing of them ! He was 
a man of few words, and he had few friends : 
notable chiefly for his truthfulness and good faith, they 
called him ' Al Amyn,' the Trusty. His tending his 
employer's flocks ; his journeys to Syria ; possibly his ^^ 

short-lived friendship there with Sergius or Bahira, a 
Nestorian monk; his famous vow to succour the 
oppressed ; his employment by Kadijah in a trade 
venture, and his subsequent happy marriage with her, 
are about the only note-worthy external incidents in 
his early life. 

Up to the age of forty, there is nothing to show 
that any serious scruple had occurred to him indivi- 
dually as to the worship of idols, and in particular of 
the Black Stone, of which his family were the heredi- 
tary guardians. The sacred month of Ramadhan, like 
other religious Arabs, he observed with punctilious 
devotion ; and he would often retire to the caverns of 
Mount Hira for purposes of solitude, meditation, 
and prayer. He was melancholic in temperament, to 
begin with; he was also subject to epileptic fits, upon 
which Sprenger has laid great stress, and described 



76 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

most minutely/ and which, whether under the name 
of the * sacred disease ' among the Greeks, or * posses- 
sion by the devil ' among the Jews, has in most 
ages and countries been looked upon as something 
specially mysterious or supernatural. It is possible 
that his interviews with Nestorian monks, with Zeid, 
or with his wife's cousin Waraka, may have turned his 
thoughts into the precise direction they took. Dejec- 
tion alternated with excitement ; these gave place to 
ecstasy or dreams ; and in a dream, or trance, or fit, 
he saw an angel in human form, but flooded with 
celestial light, and displaying a silver roll. * Read ! ' 
said the angel. * I cannot read,' said Mohammed. 
The injunction and the answer were twice repeated.^ 
* Read,' at last said the angel, ' in the name of the 
Lord, who created man out of a clot of blood ; read, 
in the name of the Most High, who taught man the 
use of the pen, who sheds on his soul the ray of know- 
ledge, and teaches him what before he knew not.' 

' Sprenger, Vol. I. cap. III. 207. lie thinks Mohammed suffered 
from hysteria, followed by catalepsy, rather than epilepsy ; for the 
Prophet does not seem to have lost all consciousness. It is worth re- 
marking that Sprenger's medical knowledge is not very favourable in 
its result to Mohammed. He starts by saying, p. 210, that all 
hysterical people have a tendency to lying and deceit. This is his major 
premise. His minor is that Mohammed was hysterical, and the infe- 
rence is obvious. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find him (Vol. 
I. Cap, IV. p. 306, note) speaking of the ' vision ' of the flight to Jeru- 
salem as one 'lie,' and that to the seventh heaven as another lie. 

* Cf Sura XCVI. Deutsch (Islam, p. 306) renders the word 
usually translated 'Read ' by 'Cry,' comparing Isaiah xi. 6. 



CALL TO THE PROPHETIC OFFICE *j*i 

Upon this Mohammed felt the heavenly inspiration, 
gnd read the decrees of God, which he after^vards 
promulgated in the Koran. Then came the announce- 
ment, ' O Mohammed, of a truth thou art the Prophet 
of God, and I am his angel Gabriel.'^ 

This was the crisis of Mohammed's life. It was 
his call to renounce idolatry, and to take the office of 
Prophet. Like Isaiah, he could not at first believe 
that so unworthy an instrument could be chosen for 
such a purpose. ' Woe is me, for I am undone, be- 
cause I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the 
midst of a people of unclean lips ;' but the live 
coal was not immediately taken from the altar and 
laid upon his, as upon Isaiah's lips. Trembling and 
agitated, Mohammed tottered to Kadijah and told 

' Strangely enough, Sir \Yilliam Muir, vol. ii. p. 89-96, selects 
this period, above all others in Mohammed's life, as the one in which 
to suggest his peculiar view, that the Prophet's belief in his inspiration 
was Satanic in its origin ; and he supports his view by a somewhat 
elaborate parallel with the temptations which presented themselves to 
Christ at the beginning of His work. Whether such a Detis ex 
machind is required to untie the knot is hardly within my province to 
inquire, since the whole matter is alike incapable of proof and dis- 
proof ; but it seems pertinent to remark, first, that the developed and 
quasi-scientific conception of such a being as Sir William Muir pictures 
is Persian rather than Jewish in its origin, and is found in Palestine 
only after the Capti^nty ; and, secondly, that if the spirit of evil did 
suggest the idea to Mohammed, he never so completely outwitted 
himself, since friend and foe must alike admit that it was Mohammed's 
firm belief in supernatural guidance that lay at the root of all he 
achieved. Without this we should never have heard of him except as 
one of a thousand short-lived Arabian sectaries ; with it he created a 
nation, and revivified a third of the then known world. 



, 78 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

her his vision and his agony of mind. He had 
always hated and despised soothsayers, and now, in 
the irony of destiny, it would appear that he was to 
become a soothsayer himself ' Fear not, for joyful 
tidings dost thou bring,' exclaimed Kadijah. ' I will 
henceforth regard thee as the prophet of our nation. 
Rejoice,' she added, seeing him still cast down ; 
* Allah will not suffer thee to fall to shame. Hast 
thou not been loving to thy kinsfolk, kind to thy 
neighbours, charitable to the poor, faithful to thy word, 
and ever a defender of the truth t ' First the life, 
and then the theology, in the individual as in the 
tribe and the nation. 

But the assurances of the good Kadijah, and the 
conversions of Zeid and Waraka, did not bring the 
live coal from the altar. A long period of hesitation, 
doubt, preparation followed. At one time Moham- 
med even contemplated suicide, and he was only 
restrained by an unseen hand, as he might well call 
the bright vision of the future, pictured in one of the 
earliest Suras of the Koran, ^ when the help of God 
should come and victor}^, when he 'should see the 
people crowding into the one true Faith, and he, the 
Prophet, should celebrate the praise of his Lord, and 
ask pardon of Him, for He is forgiving.' Three years, 
the period of the Fatrah, saw only fourteen proselytes 

» Sura ex. 



OPPOSITION TO THE PROPHET 79 

attach themselves to him. His teaching seemed to 
make no way beyond the very Hmited circle of his 
earliest followers. His rising hopes were crushed. 
People pointed the finger of scorn at him as he passed 
by : ' There goeth the son of Abdallah, who hath his 
converse with the heavens ! ' They called him a 
driveller, a star-gazer, a maniac-poet. His uncles 
sneered, and the main body of the citizens treated 
him with that contemptuous indifference, which must 
have been harder to him to bear than active persecu- 
tion. Well might he, to take an illustration suggested 
by Sir W. Muir himself, ^ like Elijah of old, go a day's 
journey into the wilderness, and request for himself 
that he might die, and say, ' It is enough, O Lord ; 
now take away my life, for I am not better than my 
fathers : ' or, again, ' I have been very jealous for the 
Lord God of hosts, because the people have forsaken 
Thy covenant, thrown down Thine altars, and slain Thy 
prophets with the sword ; and I, even I, only am left, 
and they seek my life to take it away.' At times his 
distress was insupportable : 

* And had not his poor heart 
Spoken with That, which being everywhere 
Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone, 
Surely the man had died of solitude.' 

But out of weakness came forth strength at last ; out 
of doubt, certainty ; out of humiliation, victory. Another 

1 Muir, Vol. II., 228. 



8o MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

vision, in which he was commanded to preach pubhcly, 
followed ; and now he called the Koreishites of the 
line of Hachim together, those who had most to lose 
and least to gain by his reform, and boldly announced 
his mission. They tried persuasion, entreaties, bribes, 
and threats. ' Should they array against me the sun 
on my right hand, and the moon on my left,' said Mo- 
hammed, * yet while God should command me, I would 
not renounce my purpose.' These are not the words, 
nor this the course, of an impostor. 

Ten more years passed away ; his doctrine fought 
its way amidst the greatest discouragements and 
dangers by purely moral means, by its own inherent 
strength. Kadijah was dead ; Abu Taleb, his uncle 
and protector, died also. Most of Mohammed's dis- 
ciples had taken refuge in Abyssinia, and at last Mo- 
hammed himself was driven to fly for his life with 
one companion, his early convert, Abu Bakr. For 
three days he lay concealed in a cavern, a league from 
Mecca. The Koreishite pursuers scoured the country, 
thirsting for his blood. They approached the cavern. 
* We are only two,' said his trembling companion. 
' There is a third,' said Mohammed ; ' it is God himself.' 
The Koreishites reached the cave ; a spider, we are 
told, had woven its web across the mouth, and a 
pigeon was sitting on its nest in seemingly undis- 
turbed repose. The Koreishites retreated, for it was 



THE HEGIRA 8i 

evident the solitude of the place was unviolated ; and, 
by a sound instinct, one of the sublimest stories in all 
history has been made the era of Mohammedan 
Chronology. 

It is unnecessary to follow connectedly and in detail 
any other incidents in Mohammed's life. The above 
may be found, with some variety in the details, in any 
History of Mohammed,' but I have thought it essen- 
tial to dwell upon them, however familiar they may 
be to some of us, as they seem to me, apart from their 
own intrinsic beauty, to supply the key to almost 
everything else in Mohammed's career. 

The question of the sincerity of Mohammed has 
been much debated, but to me, I must confess, that 
to question his sincerity at starting, and to admit the 
above indisputable facts, is very like a contradic- 
tion in terms. Nor could anyone have done what 
Mohammed did without the most profound faith in 
the reality and goodness of his cause. Fairly con- 
sidered, there is no single trait in his character up to 
the time of the Hegira which calumny itself could 
couple with imposture : on the contrary, there is every- 
thing to prove the real enthusiast arriving slowly and 
painfully at what he believed to be the truth. 

It has been remarked by Gibbon that no incipient 
prophet ever passed through so severe an ordeal as 

^ See especially W. Irving, 32, 33; and Muir, Vol. II. 

G 



82 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Mohammed, since he first presented himself as a 
prophet to those who were most conversant with his 
infirmities as a man. Those who knew him best, his 
wife, his eccentric slave, his cousin, his earliest friend, 
he who, as Mohammed said, alone of his converts, 
* turned not back, neither was perplexed,' were the first 
to recognise his mission. The ordinary lot of a pro- 
phet was in his case reversed ; he was not without 
honour save among those who did not know him well. 
Strange that Voltaire, who himself wrote on Moham- 
med, and even made him the subject of a drama, 
should, with Mohammed's example before him, have 
ventured on his immoral paradox that ' No man is 
a hero to his valet ! ' Explained in one sense, that a 
small mind cannot fully understand or appreciate a 
great one, it is a feeble truism ; explained in another, 
which was the sense Voltaire meant, that the hero is 
only a hero to those who see him at a distance, and 
that there is no such thing as true greatness, it is an 
audacious falsehood. It is almost equally strange 
that Gibbon, who has done such full justice to 
Mohammed in the general result, should say at start- 
ing, * Mohammed's religion consists of an eternal 
truth, and a necessary fiction — There is one God, and 
Mohammed is his prophet.' It was, as I have 
endeavoured to show, no fiction to Mohammed himself 
or to his followers ; had it been so, Mohammedanism 



SINCERITY OF MOHAMMED 83 

could never have risen as it did, nor be what it is 
now. 

But before we go on to consider those points in 
Mohammed's career which are really open to question, 
it may be well to recall a few prominent characteristics 
of the man who has stamped his impress so deeply on 
the Oriental world. Minute accounts of his appear- 
ance and of his daily life have been preserved to us ; 
they may be found in most of the biographies, and 
Sir William Muir in particular has given us copious 
extracts from the writings of the secretary of Wakidy.* 
Mohammed was of middle height and of a strongly 
built frame ; his head was large, and across his ample 
forehead, and above finely arching eyebrows, ran a 
strongly marked vein, which, when he was angry, 
would turn black and throb visibly. His eyes were 
coal black, and piercing in their brightness ; his hair 
curled slightly ; and a long beard, which, like other 
Orientals, he would stroke when in deep thought, 
added to the general impressiveness of his appear- 
ance. His step was quick and firm, ' like that of 
one descending a hill.' Between his shoulders was 
the famous mark, the size of a pigeon's ^^g^ which 
his disciples persisted in believing to be the sign of 
his prophetic ofRce ; while the light which kindled m 

» Muir, Vol. IV. , Supplement to Chap. XXXVII. ; cf. also Deutsch's 
' Islam,' pp. 302-304. 

G 2 



84 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

h's eye, like that which flashed from the precious 
stones in the breast-plate of the High Priest, they 
called the light of prophecy. 

In his intercourse with others, he would sit silent 
among his companions for a long time together, but 
truly his silence was more eloquent than other men's 
speech, for the moment speech was called for, it was 
forthcoming in the shape of some weighty apothegm 
or proverb, such as the Arabs love to hear. When he 
laughed, he laughed heartily, shaking his sides, and 
showing his teeth, which ' looked as if they were hail- 
stones.' He was easy of approach to all who wished 
to see him, even as * the river bank to him that 
draweth water therefrom.' He was fond of animals, 
and they, as is often the case, were fond of him. He 
seldom passed a group of children playing together 
without a few kind words to them ; and he was never 
the first to withdraw his hand from the grasp of one 
who offered him his. If the warmth of his attachment 
may be measured, as in fact it may, by the depth of 
his friends' devotion to him, no truer friend than Mo- 
hammed ever lived. Around him, in quite early days, 
gathered what was best and noblest in Mecca ; and in 
no single instance, through all the vicissitudes of his 
chequered life, was the friendship then formed, ever 
broken. He wept like a child over the death of his 
faithful servant Zeid. He visited his mother's tomb 



CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PROPHET 85 

some fifty years after her death, and he wept there 
because he believed that God had forbidden him 
to pray for her. He was naturally shy and retiring ; 

* as bashful,' said Ayesha, ' as a veiled virgin.' He 
was kind and forgiving to all. ' I served him from the 
time I was eight years old,' said his servant Anas, 

* and he never scolded me for anything, though I 
spoiled much.' The most noteworthy of his external 
characteristics was a sweet gravity and a quiet 
dignity, which drew involuntary respect, and which 
was the best, and often the only protection he enjoyed 
from insult. 

His ordinary dress was plain, even to coarseness ; ,^ 
yet he was fastidious in arranging it to the best ^ 
advantage. He was fond of ablutions, and fonder 
still of perfumes ; and he prided himself on the neat- 
ness of his hair, and the pearly whiteness of his teeth. / 
His life was simple in all its details. He lived with 
his wives in a row of humble cottages, separated from 
one another by palm branches, cemented together 
with mud. He would kindle the fire, sweep the 
floor, and milk the goats himself Ayesha tells us 
that he slept upon a leathern mat, and that he mended 
his clothes, and even clouted his shoes, with his own 
hand. For months together, Ayesha is also our 
authority for saying that he did not get a sufficient 
meal. The little food that he had was always shared 



86 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

with those who dropped In to partake of it. Indeed, 
outside the Prophet's house was a bench or gallery, on 
which were always to be found a number of the poor 
who lived entirely on the Prophet's generosity, and were 
hence called the 'people of the bench.' His ordinary 
food was dates and water, or barley bread ; milk and 
honey were luxuries of which he was fond, but which he 
rarely allowed himself The fare of the desert seemed 
most congenial to him, even when he was sovereign of 
Arabia. One day some people passed by him with a 
basket of berries from one of the desert shrubs. * Pick me 
out,' he said to his companion, ' the blackest of those 
berries, for they are sweet — even such as I was wont 
to gather when I fed the flocks of Mecca at Adgad.' 

Such were some of the characteristics of the man 
whom ■ the Arabs were now called upon to recognise 
as the prophet of their country, and as a messenger 
direct from God. 

Monotheism, pure and simple, if it is to be a life as 
well as a creed, almost postulates the prophetic office. 
The Creator is at too great a distance from His crea- 
tures to allow of a sufficiently direct communication 
with them. The power, the knowledge, the infinity of 
God overshadow His providence. His sympathy, and 
His love. Renan has remarked that in only two 
ways can such a gap be bridged over : first, if, as in 
the Indian Avatar, from time to time, or, as in Chris- 



PROPHETIC OFFICE AMONG SEMITIC RACES 87 

tianity, once for all, there is an actual manifestation 
of the Godhead upon earth ; or, secondly, if, as in 
Judaism or in Buddhism, the Deity chooses a favoured 
mortal, who may give to his brother men a fuller 
knowledge of the Divine mind and will.^ The latter 
would seem the form most congenial to the Semitic 
mind, if one may be allowed to use that convenient, 
but since the bold generalisations in which Renan has 
indulged respecting them, somewhat misleading word. 
The Arabs themselves looked up to Adam, Noah, 
Abraham, and Moses as prophets ; Mohammed did 
the same, and added Christ to their number. He 
held that each successive revelation had been higher 
than the preceding one, though each was complete in 
itself, as being adequate to the circumstances of the 
time. Was there, Mohammed might ask, any reason 
to suppose that Christ had been the last of the 
prophets, and that His revelation was absolutely as 
well as relatively final ; and were there not evils 
enough in Arabia and in the world to call for a 
further communication from heaven 1 To say that 
Arabia needed renovation was to say in other words 
that the time for a new prophet had come, and why 
might not that prophet be Mohammed himself.^ 
Sprenger, the most recent and exhaustive writer on 
the subject, has shown that for some hundred years 

* Renan, p. 278. 



88 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

before Mohammed the advent of another prophet had 
been expected and even predicted. So strong was 
the general conviction on the subject that the Arab 
tribes were guided by it even in their politics.^ 

But, if we admit the sincerity of Mohammed and 
the naturalness of his belief up to the time of the 
Hegira, what are we to say of him during his first 
years of exile at Medina, and again of his subsequent 
successes ? 

It is unquestionably true that a change does seem 
to come over him. The revelations of the Koran 
are more and more suited to the particular circum- 
stances and caprices of the moment. They are often 
of the nature of political bulletins, or of personal apo- 
logies rather than of messages direct from God. Now 
appears for the first time the convenient but dangerous 
doctrine of abrogation, by which a subsequent revela- 
tion might supersede a previous one.^ 

The limitation to the unbounded license of Oriental 
polygamy which he had himself imposed, he relaxes 
in his own behalf ; ^ the greatest stain, and an indelible 
one, on his memory, though it is possible that he may 

* Sprenger, I., p. 245, quotes a saying of the Arabs that the children 
of Shem are prophets, of Japhet kings, of Ham slaves. We are told 
that the Arab women were at this time in the habit of praying for male 
children, in the hope that of them the long-expected prophet might be 
bom, 

« Sura XVI. 103, II. lOO. 

» Sura XXXIII. 49, and LXVI. i. 



APPARENT CHANGE IN MOHAMMED 89 

have justified himself to his own mind by the 
Ethiopian marriage not condemned in the case of 
Moses.^ The pubHc opinion even of the harem was 
scandahsed by his marriage with Mary, an Egyptian, 
a Christian, and a slave. His marriage with Zeinab, 
the wife of Zeid, his freedman and adopted son, 
divorced as she was by Zeid for the express purpose 
that Mohammed might marry her, was still worse. It 
was felt as an outrage even upon the lax morality of 
an Oriental nation, till all reclamations were hushed 
into silence by a Sura of the Koran which rebuked 
Mohammed, not for his laxity, but for his undue 
abstinence ! ^ 

The doctrine of toleration gradually becomes one of 
extermination ; persecuted no longer, he becomes a 
persecutor himself ; with the Koran in one hand, the 
scymitar in the other, he goes forth to offer to the 
nations the threefold alternative of conversion, tribute, 
death. He is once or twice untrue to the kind and 

^ See Lecture IV. p. 184. 

^ Sura XXXIII. 37. See a good passage on the subject in ' British 
Quarterly Review' for January 1872, page 131. 

It should be remembered, however, that most of Mohammed's marriages 
are to be explained, at least, as much by his pity for the forlorn condition 
of the persons concerned, as by other motives. They were almost all 
of them with widows who were not remarkable either for their beauty 
or their wealth, but quite the reverse. May not this fact, and his un- 
doubted faithfulness to Kadijah till her dying day, and till he himself 
was fifty years of age, give us some ground to hope that calumny has 
been at work in the story of Zeinab ? There are some indications on 
the face of it that this is the case. 



90 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

forgiving disposition of his best nature ; and is once 
or twice unrelenting in the punishment of his personal 
enemies, especially of the Jews, who had disappointed 
his expectation that they would join him, and of such 
as had stung him by their lampoons or libels. He is 
even guilty more than once of conniving at the assas- 
sination of inveterate opponents ; and the massacre of 
the Bani Koreitza, though they had deserted him 
almost on the field of battle, and their lives were forfeit, 
by all the laws of war, moved the misgivings of others 
than the disaffected. He might, no doubt, believing, 
as he did, in his own inspiration, have found an ample 
precedent for the act in the slaughter of the Canaanites 
by Joshua two thousand years before, or even in the 
wars of Saul and David with neighbouring tribes; but, 
judged by any but an Oriental standard of morality, 
and by his own conspicuous magnanimity on other 
occasions, his act, in all its accessories, was one of 
cold-blooded and inhuman atrocity. 

Can we explain away or extenuate these blots 
on his memory, or, if we cannot, are they inconsis- 
tent with substantial sincerity and singlemindedness } 
Here is a problem of surpassing interest to the psy- 
chologist, and I have only time to touch lightly upon it. 
/^In the first place, the change in his character and 
aims is not to be separated from the general condi- 
tions of his life. At first he was a religious and moral 



HOW EXPLAINED 91 

reformer only, and could not, even if he would, have 
met the evils of his time by any other than by moral 
means. If he was without the advantages, he was 
also free from the dangers, of success. A religion 
militant is, as all ecclesiastical history shows, very 
different from a religion triumphant. The Prophet in 
spite of himself became, by the force of circumstances, 
more than a prophet. Not, indeed, that with him 
height ever begot high thoughts. He preserved to 
the end of his career that modesty and simplicity of 
life which is the crowning beauty of his character ; but 
he became a temporal ruler, and, where the Koran did 
not make its way unaided, the civil magistrate natu- 
rally used temporal means. Under such circumstances, 
and when his followers pressed upon him their 
belief in the nature of his mission, who can draw the 
line where enthusiasm ends, and self-deception or even 
imposture begins "i No one who knows human nature 
will deny that the two are often perfectly consistent 
with each other. Once persuaded fully of his divine 
mission as a whole, a man unconsciously begins to 
invest his personal fancies and desires with a like sanc- 
tion : it is not that he tampers with his conscience ; 
he rather subjects conscience and reason, appetite and 
affection, to the one dominating influence ; and so, as 
time goes on, with perfect good faith gets to confound 
what comes from below with what comes from above. 



92 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

What is the meaning of the term * pions frauds,' ex- 
cept that such acts are frauds in the eyes of others, 
acts of piety in the eyes of the doer ? The more fully 
convinced a man is of the goodness of his cause, the 
more likely is he to forget the means in the end ; he 
need not consciously assert that the end justifies the 
means, but his eyes are so fixed upon the end that 
they overlook the interval between the idea and its 
realisation. He has to maintain a hold over the 
motley mass of followers that his mission has gathered 
round him. Must he not become all things to all to 
meet their several wants t Perhaps he does become 
so, and, in the process, what he gains in the bulk of 
his influence he loses in its quality. Its intensity is 
in inverse proportion to its extension. No man — I 
quote here, with only such slight alteration as adapts 
them to my subject, the noble words of George 
Eliot : * No man,whether prophet, statesman, or popular 
preacher, ever yet kept a prolonged hold over a mixed 
multitude without being in some measure degraded 
thereby. His teaching or his life must be accommo- 
dated to the average wants of his hearers, and not to 
his own finest insight. But, after all, we should regard 
the life of every great man as a drama, in which there must 
be important inward modifications accompanying the 
outward changes.'^ Rigid consistency in itself is no 

' Romola, Vol. II., Chap. V. p. 5. 



MORAL VALUE OF CONSLSTENCY 93 

great merit, rather the reverse : what one has a right to 
demand in a great man is that the intensity of the 
central truth he has to deliver should become, not 
less, but more intense ; that that flame shall burn so 
clear as to throw into the shade other objects which 
shine with a less brilliant light ; that the essence shall 
be pure even if some of the surroundings be alloyed ; 
and this, I think, if not more than this, with all his 
faults, we may affirm of Mohammed. 

On the whole the Avonder is to me not how much, but 
how little, under different circumstances, Mohammed 
differed from himself. In the shepherd of the desert, 
in the Syrian trader, in the solitary of Mount Hira, in 
the reformer in the minority of one, in the exile of 
Medina, in the acknowledged conqueror, in the equal 
of the Persian Chosroes and the Greek Heraclius, we 
can still trace a substantial unity. I doubt whether 
any other man, whose external conditions changed so 
much, ever himself changed less to meet them : the 
accidents are changed, the essence seems to me to be 
the same in all. 

Power, as the saying is, no doubt put the man to 
the test. It brought new temptations and therefore 
new failures, from which the shepherd of the desert 
might have remained free. But happy is the man 
who, living 

* In the fierce light that beats upon a throne, 
And blackens every blot,' 



94 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

can stand the test as well as did Mohammed. A 
Christian poet has well asked : — 

' What keeps a spirit wholly trae 
To that ideal which he bears ? 
What record ? not the sinless years 
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue.' 

' But it is a current misconception, and, subject to the 
above explanation, a very great one, that a gradual, but 
continuous and accelerating moral declension is to be 
traced from the time when the fugitive unexpectedly 
entered Medina in triumph. * Truth is come — let 
falsehood disappear,' he said, Avhen, after his long 
exile, and after the temptations of Medina had done 
their worst for him, he re-entered the Kaaba, and its 
three hundred and sixty idols, the famous Hobal 
amongst them, vanished before him ; and in his 
treatment of the unbelieving city he was marvel- 
lously true to his programme. There was now 
nothing left in Mecca that could thwart his pleasure. 
If ever he had worn a mask at all, he would now 
at all events have thrown it off; if lower aims 
had gradually sapped the higher, or his moderation 
had been directed, as Gibbon supposes, by his selfish 
interests, we should now have seen the effect ; now 
would have been the moment to gratify his ambition, 
to satiate his lust, to glut his revenge. Is there any- 
thing of the kind } Read the account of the entry of 
Mohammed into Mecca, side by side with that of 



NO CONTINUOUS DECLENSION 95 

Marius or Sulla into Rome. Compare all the at- 
tendant circumstances, the outrages that preceded, 
and the use made by each of his recovered power, and 
we shall then be in a position better to appreciate the 
magnanimity and moderation of the Prophet of 
Arabia. There were no proscription lists, no plunder, 
no wanton revenge. 

The chief blots in his fame are not after his undis- 
puted victory, but during his years of chequered war- 
fare at Medina, and, such as they are, are distributed 
very evenly over the whole of that time. In other 
words, he did very occasionally give way to a strong 
temptation ; but there was no gradual sapping of 
moral principles, and no deadening of conscience — a 
very important distinction. One or two acts of sum- 
mary and uncompromising punishment ; possibly, one 
or two acts of cunning, and, after Kadijah was dead, 
the violation of one law which he had from veneration 
for her imposed on others, and had always hitherto 
kept himself, form no very long bill of indictment 
against one who always admitted he was a man of 
like passions with ourselves, who was ignorant of 
the Christian moral law, and who attained to power 
after difficulties, and dangers, and misconceptions 
which might have turned the best of men into a 
suspicious and sanguinary tyrant.^ 

* Yet Sprenger (I. p, 359), on no more grounds than those here 



96 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

It is no doubt true that some of the revelations of 
the Koran, particularly the later ones, bear the ap- 
pearance of having been given consciously for personal 
and temporary purposes, and these have led, with 
some show of reason, even such impartial writers as 
Sir William Muir to accuse Mohammed of * the high 
blasphemy of forging the name of God.' But it would 
be strange indeed if, viewed in the light of what I have 
said above as to Mohammed's unfaltering belief in his 
own inspiration, he had not occasionally, or even often, 
revealed in the Koran the mental processes by which 
he justified to himself acts about which he may have 
himself, at first, felt scruples, or which his contem- 
poraries may have called in question. And it seems 
pertinent to ask, by way of rebutting the charge, 
whether he was not at least equally ready, when 
occasion required, to blame himself for what he had 
said or done, and to call the whole Mussulman world 
to be witnesses of his self-condemnation } And, again, 
if he was ever, in the matter of the Koran, a conscious 
impostor, why was he not so much oftener } If he 
had once knowingly tripped, and gained thereby, the 

mentioned, can say of Mohammed, that when he attained to power in 
Medina, * er wurde zum wollustigen Theokraten und blutdiirstig Ty- 
rannen, Pabst und Konig.' "What Christian Pope or King — to say 
nothing of Oriental rulers, with whom alone is it fair to compare him 
— had as great temptations and succumbed to them as little as did 
Mohammed ? 



DID HE FORGE THE NAME OF GOD? 97 

path must have been too slippery and the descent 
must have seemed too easy and inviting for him to 
recall his footsteps. But what are the facts ? Take 
two samples. 

On one occasion, in a moment of despondency, he 

made a partial concession to idolatry. He thought to 
win over the recalcitrant Koreishites to his views by 
allowing that their gods might make intercession with 
the supreme God. 

* What think ye of Al-Lat, and Al-Uzza, and Manah, the third besides ? 
They are the exalted Females, and their intercession with God may be 
hoped for.' 

The Koreishites, overjoyed, signified their adhesion to 
Mohammed, and it seemed that they would bring 
over all Mecca with them. His friends would have 
passed the matter over as quietly as possible. So 
great was the scandal among the Faithful that some 
of his earliest historians omit it altogether. But the 
Prophet's conscience was too tender for that. In an 
hour of weakness Mohammed had mistaken ex- 
pediency for duty, and having discovered his mistake, 
he would recall the concession, at all hazards, as 
publicly as he had made it, even at the risk of 
the Im^putatlon of weakness and of Imposture. The 
amended version of the Sura ran thus : 

' What think ye of Al-Lat, and Al-Uzza, and Manah, the third besides ? 
They are nought but empty names which ye and your fathers have invented.' ' 

1 Sura LIII. ; cf. also XVII. 75, and XXII. 51 ; see Muir, II. 

H 



98 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

I will give one more instance. It is a memorable 
one. Mohammed was engaged in earnest conversa- 
tion with Wallid, a powerful Koreishite, whose con- 
version he much desired. A blind man in very 
humble circumstances, Abdallah by name, happened 
to come up, and, not knowing that Mohammed was 
otherwise engaged, exclaimed, * Oh, Apostle of God, 
teach me some part of what God has taught thee.' 
Mohammed, vexed at the interruption, frowned and 
turned away from him. But his conscience soon 
smote him for having postponed the poor and humble 
to the rich and powerful, and the next day's Sura 
showed that this ' forger of God's name ' was at least 
as ready to forge it for his own condemnation as in his 
defence. The Sura is known by the significant title 
' He frowned,' and runs thus : 

' The Prophet frowned, and turned aside, • 

Because the blind man came unto him. 
And how knowest thou whether he might not have Been cleansed from 

his sins, 
Or whether he might have been admonished, and profited thereby ? 

As for the man that is rich. 

Him thou receivest graciously ; 
And thou carest not that he is not cleansed. 

But as for him that cometh unto thee earnestly seeking his salvation, 
And trembling anxiously, him dost thou neglect. 

By no means shouldst thou act thus.' 



p. 149-158, and Sprenger, II, 17, where there is a curious disserta- 
tion on the word Gharanyk, used for Females — 'swans which mount 
higher and higher towards God.' 



NATURE AND LIMITS OF HIS MISSION 99 

And, ever after this, we are told that, when the 
Prophet saw the poor bhnd man, he went out of his way 
to do him honour, saying ' The man is thrice welcome 
on whose account my Lord hath reprimanded me,' 
and he made him twice Governor of Medina.^ 

Mohammed never wavered in his belief in his own 
mission, nor, what is more extraordinary, in his belief 
as to its precise nature and well-defined limits. He 
was a prophet charged with a mission from God ; no- 
thing less, but nothing more. He might make mis- 
takes, lose battles, do wrong acts, but none the less 
did he believe that the words he spoke were the very 
words of God. To every Sura of the Koran he pre- 
fixed the words * In the name of God, the Compas- 
sionate, the Merciful,' even as the Hebrew prophet 
would open his message with his 'Thus saith the Lord ;' 
and before every sentence and every word of the 
Sacred Book is to be read, between the lines, the word 
* say,' indicating that Mohammed believed, what Moses 
and Isaiah only believed on special occasions, that in 
his utterances he was the mere mouthpiece, and there- 

^ Sura LXXX., with Sale's note ad loc. ; and Muir, II. p. 128. Sir 
Wm. Muir tells the story much as I have related it, but seems quite unable 
to see its grandeur, for he only remarks upon it, ' This incident illus- 
trates at once the anxiety of Mohammed to gain over the principal men 
of the Koreish, and when he was rejected, the readiness with which he 
turned to the poor and i\ninfluential.' Was ever moral sublimity 
so ^maiTed, or heroism so vulgarised? How Mohammed towers above 
even his best historians! 

H 2 



lOO MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

fore the unerring mouthpiece, of the Infinite and the 
Eternal. He might win his way against superhuman 
difficulties, preserve a charmed life, do deeds which 
seemed miracles to others, gain the homage of all 
Arabia, and present in his own person an ideal of 
morality never before pictured by an Arab ; and yet 
he never forgot himself, or claimed to be more than a 
weak and fallible mortal. 

As his view of his own mission is an all-important 
point in estimating his character, let us deal, in con- 
cluding this Lecture, with facts alone, and watch his 
conduct at a few critical epochs which I have purposely 
selected, as throwing light upon the matter, in its dif- 
ferent aspects, away from their chronological order and 
from very different periods of his life. 

When the Persian monarch Chosroes was con- 
templating with pride, like Nebuchadnezzar of old, 
the great Artemita that he had built and all its fabu- 
lous treasures, he received a letter from an obscure 
citizen of Mecca,bidding him acknowledge Mohammed 
as the Prophet of God. Chosroes tore the letter into 
pieces. ' It is thus ,' exclaimed the Arabian Prophet 
when he heard of it, ' that God will tear his kingdom 
and reject his supplications.' No prediction could 
have seemed at the time less likely to be accomplished, 
since Persia was at its height, and Constantinople at 
its lowest. But Mohammed lived to see its fulfilment, 



MOSEILAMA, THE LIAR lor 

and yet never claimed in consequence, as others might 
have done, the power of prophecy. 

While he had as yet only half established his 
position, a powerful Christian tribe tendered their 
submission, if only he would leave their chief some 
remnant of his power. ' Not one unripe date/ replied 
Mohammed.^ We remember how the French rheto- 
rician the other day, knowing that his nation, if they 
are slaves to nothing else, are always slaves to an 
epigram, prolonged resistance to the bitter end by his 
famous declaration that not ' an inch of their territory 
nor a stone of their fortresses ' would the French sur^ 
render. And we may imagine the effect produced 
upon the handful of Mohammed's Meccan followers 
who were still in exile at Medina by such an answer, 
coming from one who was certainly no vapid rhetori- 
cian, who preferred silence to speech, and who never 
said a thing he did not really mean. 

Moseilama, the most formidable of the rival pro- 
phets whom Mohammed's success stirred up, thinking 
that Mohammed's game was a merely selfish one, and 
that two might play at it, sent to Mohammed to offer 
to go shares with him in the good things of the world, 
which united they might easily divide. The letter was 
of Spartan brevity: 'Moseilama the apostle of God to 
Mohammed the apostle of God. — Now let the earth be 

^ Muir, Vol. IV. p. 59. 



102 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

half mine and half thine.' Mohammed's reply was 
hardly less laconic : * Mohammed the apostle of God 
to Moseilama the liar. — The earth is God's, He giveth it 
to such of His servants as He pleaseth, and they who 
fear Him shall prosper.' 

Again mark his conduct under failure or rebuff. 
He had lost, within three days of each other, Abu 
Taleb his one protector, and his venerable wife 
Kadijah, that toothless old woman, as Ayesha long 
afterwards in the bloom of her beauty called her; 
the wife who, as Mohammed indignantly replied, 
* when he was poor had enriched him, when he 
was called a liar had alone believed in him, when 
he was opposed by all the world had alone remained 
true to him.' ^ What was he to do t Silence and the 
desert seemed the one chance of safety, but what did 
he do 1 Followed only by Zeid, his faithful freedman, 
he went to Tayif, the town after Mecca most wholly 
given to idolatry ; and like Elijah in Samaria he 
boldly challenged the protection and obedience of the 

^ Sprenger characteristically remarks (I, 151) that Mohammed's 
faithfulness to Kadijah to her dying day was due probably not to his 
inclination, but to his dependence on her. Why, then, the interval 
before Mohammed married again ? And why, long afterwards, his noble 
burst of gratitude to her memory when Ayesha contrasted her own 
youth and beauty with Kadijah's age and infirmities, and asked, ' Am 
not I much better than she?' 'No, by Allah,' replied Mohammed; 
' no, by Allah ; when I was poor she enriched me,' &c. Was Moham- 
med dependent upon the dead ? For cynical remarks of a similar kind 
see, amongst many other instances, Sprenger, II. 19, 23, 86. 



DEATH OF THE PROPHET 103 

inhabitants. They stoned him out of the city. He 
returned to Mecca defeated, but not disheartened ; 
cast down, but not destroyed ; quietly saying to himself, 

* If thou, O Lord, art not angry, I am safe ; I seek 
refuge in the light of thy countenance alone.' ^ 

After the tide had turned in his favour, and the 
battle of Bedr had, as it seemed, put the seal to his mili- 
tary success, he was signally defeated and wounded 
almost to the death at Mount Ohud. People began to 
desert him; but a Sura, Mohammed's 'order of the day,' 
appeared : ' Mohammed is no more than a prophet. 
What if he had been killed, needs ye go back '^. He that 
turneth back injureth not God in the least, but himself.* ^ 
The spell of his untaught eloquence recalled them to 
themselves, and we are assured that his defeat at 
Ohud advanced his cause as much as did his victory 
at Bedr. 

Ayesha, his favourite wife, one day asked of him, 

* O Prophet of God, do none enter Paradise but through 
God's mercy .'* ' ' None, none, none,' replied he. * But 
will not even you enter by your own merits .'' ' 
Mohammed put his hand upon his head and thrice 
replied, 'Neither shall I enter Paradise unless God 
cover me with His mercy.' There was no ' false certi- 
tude of the Divine intentions,' the besetting temptation 

^ See the story in full in Muir, Vol. II. p. 198-203. 
2 Sura III. 138. 



104 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

of spiritual ambition ; no facile dogmatising upon 
what he had only to hint to be believed — his own pre- 
eminent position in the unseen world. It would have 
been safe to do so : Ig a(pa.vs§ tov ;xy5ov avivsUag ovx, 'iysi 
sKsy^ov :^ and how few could have resisted a like 
temptation ! 

And at the last grand scene of all, when the Pro- 
phet had met his death, as he had always told his 
doubting followers he must, and Omar, the Simon 
Peter of Islam, in the agony of his grief drew his 
scymitar and wildly rushing in among the weeping 
Mussulmans swore that he would strike off the head 
of any one who dared to say that the Prophet was 
dead — the Prophet could not be dead — it was by a 
gentle reminder of what the Prophet himself had 
always taught, that the venerable Abu Bakr, the 
earliest of the Prophet's friends, and his successor in 
the Kaliphate, calmed his excitement : ' Is it then 
Mohammed, or the God of Mohammed, that we have 
learned to worship ? ' 

» Hdt. II. 23. 



LECTUEE III. 



February 28, 1874. 



MOHAMMEDANISM. 

Allahu Akbar — God is great — there is no God but God, and 
JVIohammed is his Prophet. 

In the concluding part of my last Lecture I dis- 
cussed at length the question of the character of 
Mohammed, and we arrived, I think, at the conclusion 
that, on the one hand, he had grave moral faults which 
may be accounted for, but not excused, by the circum- 
stances of the time, by the exigencies of his situation, 
and by the weaknesses of human nature. And on the 
other, we saw reason to believe that he was not only 
passionately impressed with the reality of his divine 
mission in early life, but that the common view of a 
great moral declension to be traced in his latter years 
is not borne out by the evidence, and that to the end of 
his career, amidst failures and successes, in life and in 
preparation for death, he was true to the one principle 



io6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

^vith which he started. He became indeed, by the 
force of circumstances, general and ruler, lawgiver and 
judge of all Arabia ; but above all and before all, he 
was still a simple prophet delivering God's message in 
singleness of heart, obeying, as far as he could, God's 
will, but never claiming to be more than God's weak 
and erring servant. 

^ And now, perhaps, it is time to ask what was the 
-essence of Mohammed's belief, that which made him 
what he was, which has given his religion its inex- 
liaustible vitality .'' How did it resemble^ and how did 
it differ from, the religions which it overthrew, and one 
of which at least we are accustomed to look upon, and 
shall, in its pure form as it came from Christ's own 
lips, and can still be read in Christ's own acts, and 
■even to some extent in the character of His ser- 
vants, always continue to look upon, as immeasurably 
.superior to Mohammedanism t 

The essence of Mohammedanism is not merely the 
sublime belief in the unity of God, though it is difficult 
to us to realise the tumult of the feelings, and the 
intensity of the life, which must be awakened in a 
Polytheistic people, who are also imaginative and 
■energetic, when, on a sudden, they recognise the One 
in and behind the Many. Mohammed started indeed 
with the dogmatic assertion that there was but one 
God, the Creator of all things in heaven and earth, all 



ESSENCE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 107 

powerful, knowing all things, everywhere present. He 
reiterates this in a thousand shapes as the forefront 
of his message ; ^ and sublimely confident that it need 
only be stated to ensure ultimate acceptance, he 
deigns not to offer proof of that which, in -his judg- 
ment, must prove itself. 

But it was more than the unity of God, and the 
attributes which flow from that conception, which 
Mohammed asserted. A theoretic assent to this 
might have had but httle influence on practice. What 
is by its nature immeasurably above man, may also 
be immeasurably removed from him ; and accordingly 
Mohammed reasserted that which had been the life of 
the old Hebrew nation, and the burden of the song of 
every Hebrew prophet — that God not only lives, but 
that He is a righteous and a merciful ruler ; and that to 
His will it is the duty and the privilege of all living 
men to bow.^ Nor was the sublimity of this doctrine 

' See especially Suras I. and CXII., the beo;inning and end of the 
Koran in the orthodox arrangement; also Sura XXXV. 41 -44. Cf. also 
Sura II. 19-20, 109; VI. 1-6; XIII. 10, 11 ; XVI. 12-17; LIII. 
and XCVI. 

' See this well drawn out in Maurice's 'Religions of the World,' p, 
21-24. The passage is a most suggestive one. I owe much to it, and 
it seems to me that here, and in many other passages of his writings, 
Mr. Maurice did far more, and penetrated far deeper, than is allowed 
in a very brilliant passage of a recent work (see ' Literature and Dogma,' 
P- 345)- When the unacknowledged debts of the nineteenth century 
to its great writers come to be added up, I am convinced that it will be 
fully recognised that the mental powei-s of Mr. Maurice rank as high 
as did the purity and nobility of his life ; and more can hardly be said. 



io8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

marred in its application by the old Hebrew exclu- 
siveness. The Arabian nation was first called indeed ; 
but as in Christianity, and as it was not in Judaism, 
the obligations of the Arabs were to be measured by 
their privileges, and the call was to be extended 
through them to the world at large. The Jew sur- 
rendered his birthright if he imparted his faith 
to other peoples. The Arab surrendered his if he 
did not spread his faith wherever and however he 
could/ 

But Mohammed's assertion of the unity of God, and 
of His rule over every detail of man's life, was no mere 
plagiarism from an older faith. The Jewish people 
at large had, even in their best days, rushed wildly 
after the worship of alien gods ; at last, indeed, the 
iron of the Captivity had entered into their souls ; they 
learned much during their sojourn in the East, but 
they unlearned more ; they unlearned there, once 
and for ever, the sin of idolatry. But though they 
never henceforward worshipped other gods, the higher 
teaching of their prophets they still too much ignored, 
and the period which might have been the culmination 
of their glory ended in that tragedy of tragedies which 
was the immediate precursor of their fall. The sceptre 
departed from Judah, but the Jewish exiles in Arabia 
still clung desperately to the phantom of those proud 
religious privileges when all which had given some 



WHAT MOHAMMEDANISM SWEPT AWAY 109 

claim to them had disappeared. Christians too, such 
Christians as Mohammed had ever met, had for- 
gotten at once the faith of the Jews, and that higher 
revelation of God given to them by Christ which 
the Jews rejected. Homoousians and Homoiou- 
sians, Monothelites and Monophysites, Jacobites and 
Eutychians, making hard dogmas of things wherein 
the sacred writers themselves had made no dogma, 
disputing fiercely whether what was mathematically 
false could be metaphysically true, and nicely dis- 
criminating the shades of truth and falsehood in the 
views suggested to bridge over the abysmal gulf 
between them ; turning figures into facts, rhetoric 
into logic, and poetry into prose, had forgotten the ' 
unity of God, while they were disputing about it 
most loudly with their lips. They busied themselves 
Avith every question about Christ except those which 
might have led them to imitate Christ's life. Now 
/Mohammed came to make a clean sw^eep of such 
unrealities. Images : what are they ? * Bits of 
black wood, pretending to be God ; ' ^ philosophical 
theories, and theological cobwebs. Away with them all ! 
God is great, and there is nothing else great. This is 
the Mussulman Creed. ^ Islam,' that is, man must resign 
his will to God's, and fxud his highest happiness in so 
doing. This is the Mussulman life, y' And I would 

^ Carlyle, 'Hei'oes,' p. 226. 



no MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

remark here, and would particularly beg those who 
are doing me the honour to attend these Lectures, to 
bear in mind that though I have, in compliance with 
European custom, often spoken of Mohammedanism 
and Mohammedans, the name was never used by 
Mohammed himself, or by his earlier disciples, and, in 
spite of the reverence paid to their Prophet, it has 
always been rejected by his followers themselves as a 
rightful appellation. To quote once more the noble 
words of Abu Bakr, it was not Mohammed, but the God 
of Mohammed, that the Prophet taught his followers 
to worship. ^ The creed is ' Islam,' a verbal noun, 
/ derived from a root meaning ' submission to ' and 
/ *■ faith in God,' and the believers who so submit them- 
selves are called Moslems, a participle of the same 
root, both being connected with the words * Salam,' or 
j * peace,' and ' Salym,' or ' healthy.' ^ There was nothing, 
' therefore, theoretically new in what I have described 
as the central truth of Islam, for it was this belief that 
lay at the root of the greatness of the Jewish nation, 
and their separation from all other nations. Certain 
forms of Christianity have asserted it as strongly as 
did Mohammed. It is this principle which has been 
the strength of Calvinism and of Puritanism, and in 
this direction perhaps lies the explanation of the fact 
that those forms of religion which have been theoreti- 
cally most fatalistic have by their acts given the 

' Sprenger, vol. i. p, 69. 



* MOHAMMEDANISM A MISNOMER nt 

strongest practical assertion of free-will. This was the \ 
spark from heaven which lit the train. In his assertion 
of this, lay the religious genius of Mohammed. This 
gave the Arabs ' unity as a nation, discipline and 
enthusiasm as an army.' ' This sent them forth in 
their wild crusade against the world ; and, armed with 
this, they swept away before them every creed, or 
memory of a creed, which did not then contain any 
principle so inspiring. 

Such then were the two leading principles of the .^ 
new creed ; the existence of one God, whose will was ■ 
to be the rule of life, and the mission of Mohammed/ 
to proclaim what that will was. The one doctrine as 
old, if not older than the time when the father of the 
faithful left his Chaldean home in obedience to the 
Divine will ; the other sanctioned indeed, in its general 
assertion of the prophetic office, by the traditionary 
belief of both Jews and Arabs ; but startling enough 
in the time at which the revelation came, in the 
instrument selected, and in the way in which he 
proclaimed it. In this consists the real originality, 
such as it is, of Mohammedanism. The other articles 
of faith, added to the two I have already discussed — 
the written revelation of God's will, the responsi- 
bility of man, the existence of angels and of 
Jinn, the future life, the resurrection, and the 
final judgment — are to be found, either developed 

* Maurice, loc. cit. 



J 12 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

•or in germ, in the systems, either of Jews, or 
Zoroastrians, or Christians. Even in the times of 
ignorance, the camel tethered to a dead man's grave 
was an indication that the grave was, even to the wild 
Arab, not the end of all things.^ 

Nor was there anything much more original in the 
four practical duties of Islam — in prayer and alms- 
,giving, in fasting and in pilgrimage.^ Prayer is the 
aspiration of the human soul towards God, common 
to every religion, from the rudest Fetishism to the 
most sublime Monotheism. Almsgiving is the most 
•easy and obvious method of evidencing that love to 
man which leads up to, and is, in its turn, the result 
of love to God. Fasting is an assertion, though a 
superficial one, of the great truth that self-denial is a 
step towards God ; but it is peculiarly liable to abuse 
as fostering the belief, so common among the ruder of 
the Semitic nations, and still commoner among ascetics 
in modern times, that God is to be feared rather than 
loved, and that there is something pleasing to Him in 

^ Sprenger says (I. 4, 301) that the reason why Mohammed refers so 
often, e.g. , in the very first Sura in chronological order, to the ' clot of 
lolood' from which man was created, is because he looked upon it much 
as Christians have done to the emerging of the butterfly from the 
chrysalis, as a proof or illustration of the resurrection. In Sura LIII. 
Mohammed says he took not the doctrine merely, but the illustra- 
tion also, from the roll of Abraham, Cf. Sura LXXV., entitled ' The 
Resurrection,' ad Jin. : * Is not the God who formed man from a mere 
embryo powerful enough to quicken the dead ? ' 

2 Cf. Milman, ' Latin Christianity,' I. 453. 



PRACTICAL DUTIES OF ISLAM 113 

pain as such ; pain, that is, apart from its effect upon 
the will, and so upon the character. Pilo^rimage is a 
concession to human feelings, not to say to human 
weakness, common again, in practice, to all the reli- 
gions of the world. But this last calls, perhaps, for 
some special remark here, since its actual influence 
has been so great, while in theory and in reality it is 
alien alike to Mohammedanism and to Christianity. 

* The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this 
mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.' 
^ God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must 
worship Him in spirit and in truth.' But from the 
time the words were spoken, even to this day, a con- 
tinuous living stream has poured towards the Holy 
Land. For nineteen centuries Christian Pilgrims have 
been seen to leave their homes and kindred, facing, now 
privations, now dangers, and now ridicule, that they 
might enjoy the sacred luxury, the ineffable re- 
ligious rapture, of beholding the city over which the 
Saviour wept, of standing on the spot which gave 
Him birth, of gazing on the lake whereon He taught, 
and of worshipping in the shrine which covers the 
rock wherein His body lay. And far be it from me 
to say, spite of the invention of the true Cross, spite 
of St. Andrew's lance and the relics of the Apostles, 
spite of the Crusades themselves, spite of the keys of 
the Holy Sepulchre, and even of the imposture of the 

I 



114 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Holy Fire, that the evils belonging to this reverence 
for places have altogether predominated over the good. 
A scientific and unimaginative age laughs at the 
weaknesses and the follies involved, but it forgets the 
dauntless faith and the heroic endurance, the sacrifice 
of self, and the romance of danger ; it forgets that it 
is the office of religion to deal with these very human 
weaknesses and follies, and make the best of such 
materials as it has to work upon. 

Christ swept away some of the abuses of the 
temple worship, and looked forward to its ultimate 
abolition ; but He did not sweep away the temple 
itself. He rather paid it its customary honours. Mo- 
hammed saw the dangers of the Kaaba worship, and, 
once and again, proposed to destroy it altogether ; 
but he had to deal with an historical faith, and with a 
shrine of immemorial antiquity, one which Diodorus 
Siculus, a hundred years before the Christian era, tells 
us, was even then ^ most ancient, and was exceedingly 
revered by the whole Arab race.' The traditions of 
the Kaaba ran back to Ishmael and Abraham, nay 
even to Seth and Adam,^ and, as its very name, 'Beit 

' Cf. Sura III. 90. ' The first temple that was founded for mankind 
was that in Becca (place of resort, i.e.^ Mecca) — Blessed, and a guid- 
ance to human beings. In it are evident signs, even the standing-place 
of Abraham, and he who entereth it is safe. And the pilgrimage to the 
temple is a service due to God from those who are able to journey 
thither.' This sentence is still woven into the covering of the Kaaba, 
sent annually by the Sultan. 



PILGRIMAGE— ITS USE AND ABUSE 115 

Allah/ shows, it might, in its first rude shape, have 
been erected by some such ancient patriarch as he 
who raised a pillar of rough stone where in his sleep 
he had seen the angels ascending and descending, and 
called it ' Bethel or Beit Allah : this is the house of God, 
and this the gate of heaven.' Mohammed cherished also 
all the family associations of a Haschimite,J and all 
the local affections of a Meccan patriot ; and the family, 
and the place, and the country, the historical lore 
and the religious imagination, combined to save the 
sacred shrine. Mohammed swept away the idols of 
the Kaaba ; he abolished the nude processions^ and 
the other abuses of its worship ; but he retained the 
Kaaba itself; and the quaint rites, which were old in 
Mohammed's time, are still religiously observed by 
the whole Mohammedan world. Seven times the \ 

' pilgrim walks around the sacred mosque, seven times 1 

he kisses the Black Stone ; he drinks the brackish ' 

water of the sacred well Zemzem, buries the parings 
of his nails and the hair he has at length shaved, in 
the consecrated ground ; he ascends Mount Arafat 
and showers stones on the three mysterious pillars.^ 

^ See a curious conversation between Mohammed and Ayesha on 
the Kaaba, illustrating the strong family feelings of the Prophet. 
Sprenger, I. iv. 315. 

2 Sura VII. 27 sq. Cf. XXII. 27-40. 

' A plan of the Kaaba, as taken by Ali Bey, and a full description 
of the Pilgrim ceremonies, which he himself went through, may be 

I 2 



ii6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Nor is the Kaaba present to the mind at those times 
only when the prescribed pilgrimage is near at hand, 
in prospect or in retrospect. The first architectural 
requisite of every Mussulman house is the niche or 
arch which points with mathematical precision to the 
sacred pile ; and, guided by this, every devout Mussul- 
man turns five times a day towards the Kiblah of the 
world, in earnest prayer to God. * That man,' says 
Dr. Johnson, 'has little to be envied whose patriotism 
would not gain force on the plains of Marathon, or 
whose piety would not grow warm among the ruins 
of lona.' The ceremonies of the Kaaba may perhaps 
seem to us ridiculous, but the shrine is one which 
kindled the feelings of the Arab patriot, and roused 
the hopes of the Bedouin of the desert, ages before 
Miltiades fought, and tens of ages before Columban 
preached. It has been consecrated in its later history 
by its connection with the grandest forward movement 
that the Eastern world has ever known ; and, in spite 
of the mummeries and the abuses which have grown 
round the pilgrimage of the Hadj in the course of 
ages, I should be slow indeed to assert that the feelings 
Avhich still draw, year after year, Mussulmen by 
myriads from the burning sands of Africa, from the 

seen in Burton's 'Pilgrimage,' III. 6i. Burckhardt and Burton hare 
both described the Black Stone minutely from personal observation ; 
and a picture of it, the size of the original, is given in Muir, II. i8. 



THE KAABA AND ITS HISTORY 117 

snows of Siberia, and the coral reefs of the Malays, 
towards a barren valley in Arabia, do not, on the whole, 
elevate rather than depress them in the scale of 
humanity. In their own rough and imperfect way, 
they raise the mind of the nomad and the shepherd 
from the animal life of the present to the memories 
of the distant past, and the hopes of the for future. 
They are a living testimony to the unity of God, and 
a homage paid by the unprogressive nations of the 
world to that Prophet who softened the savage breast, 
and elevated the savage mind, and taught them what, 
but for him, they had never learned at all. 

It will be apparent, from what I have already said, 
that of the previous faiths existing in the world, the 
one which influenced Mohammed most was, beyond 
all question, Judaism. Insomuch, that one who pro- 
bably, with the single exception of Dr. Sprenger, 
knew more of the literature of the two faiths than 
any living man — one whose loss all who take inte- 
rest in Eastern questions are now deploring, and 
one who, had he lived, would probably have done 
ampler justice to Islam and its founder than per- 
haps any one else has done or can do — the late 
Emanuel Deutsch, summed up the connection 
between them in the celebrated dictum, that ' when 
the Talmud was gathered in, the Koran began — 
post hoc ergo propter hoc' And he went on to 



Il8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

endorse and to develope what Dean Milman had 
hinted before him, that Islam was Httle else than 
a republication of Judaism, with such modifications 
as suited it to Arabian soil, pliLs the important 
addition of the prophetic mission of Mohammed.^ 
The gifted author was, perhaps, from the very extent 
of his knowledge of Talmudical literature, prone to 
trace its influence everywhere ; and the proposition 
is, perhaps, stated a little too nakedly, and, as he, 
no doubt, would have been the first to admit, needs 
some important qualifications ; but nobody would 
deny that it is substantially true. Indeed, the 
general connection between race and creed has 
been proved by the Science of Comparative Religion 
to be so intimate, that it could hardly in any case 
have been otherwise. It seems a cruel destiny that 
allows a man of great original genius to accumulate 
such vast stores of recondite learning, and then snatches 
him away before he has had time to do more than 
leave the world dimly and sadly conscious of what it 
has lost in losing him ! 

Anyhow, the Koran teems with ideas, allusions, 
and even phraseology, drawn not so much from the 

^ It must be remembered also that the ceremonialism of the Jews 
for the time almost entirely disappeared. For a full account of the 
influence of the Essenic communities and their doctrines on the rise of 
Islam, see Sprenger, I. 17-21, and 30-35 ; and for that of the Ebio- 
nites or Judaising Christians to the East of the Jordan, p. 21-28. 



DEUTSCH AND THE TALMUD 119 

written as from the oral Jewish law, from the tradi- 
tions that grew round it, and the commentaries on it. 
The Talmud, in its two divisions of Halacha and 
Haggada, sums up the intellectual and social and 
religious life of the Jews during a period of nearly 
a thousand years. It is the meeting point of the 
three Monotheistic creeds of the world ; and, even 
with the imperfect information that Eastern scholars 
have yet given respecting it, it has done much to 
throw light upon them all. / Mohammed was never 
backward to acknowledge the intimate connection 
between his faith and that of the Jews. /And in 
more than one passage of the Koran he refers with 
equal respect to their oral and to their written law. 
Nor did Christ really draw so broad a distinc- 
tion between these two as might be imagined from the 
sweeping way in which He sometimes denounces 
the Scribes and Pharisees. 'Whatsoever they that 
sit in Moses' seat bid you observe, that observe and 
do.' ^ And it is incontestable that the Pharisees, 
as a body, contained some of the best and noblest — 
Hillel and Shammai, Gamaliel and St. Paul — as it 
contained some of the worst and meanest, of their 
nation. 

And, accordingly, Mohammed, during the early 

^ St. Matt. XXIII. 2-3. See this well argued in an article on the 
Talmud, Edinburgh Revieiv for July 1873. 



I20 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

years of the Hegira, struggled hard, and, as it might 
have seemed to him, with every prospect of success, 
to secure the adhesion of the Jewish tribes who dwelt 
round Medina. He appealed to their Scriptures, 
which, he said, he came not to destroy, but to fulfil, 
and which, as he argued, for those who had eyes to 
see, pointed to him. 1/ A prophet shall the Lord your 
God raise up unto you of your brethren like unto me ; 
to him shall ye hearken.' 'Was he not like unto 
Moses ? ' he asked again and again ; ' and did he not 
spring from their brethren, the children of Ishmael .-* ' 
He adapted the fasts and the feasts of the new 
religion to their model. He took from them the law 
of usury and the law of inheritance. He owes to 
them some of his regulations respecting ablutions and 
unclean animals. He even, till he could hope no 
longer, made Jerusalem the Kiblah of the world for 
the five daily prayers. 

It must have surprised Mohammed, with his half 
knowledge of their history, that the Jews should be 
unable to enter into his views of a great Catholic 
creed, or Religion of Humanity — the creed of 
Abraham — embracing Jews, Arabs, and Christians 
in one body. But it can surprise no one who has 
ever in any degree entered into the religious genius 
of the Jewish race, or who has reflected on the 
almost insuperable difficulties which lay in the way 



EXCLUSIVENESS OF JUDAISM 121 

of the Jews accepting that higher creed, the Author 
of which it is their eternal honour to have produced, 
and their tragic destiny to have rejected. And the 
Bani Kainucaa, and the Bani Nadhir, the Bani 
Koreitsa, and the Jews of Kheibar, bitterly expe- 
rienced in Mohammed's subsequent treatment of 
them the truth of the now-all-too-familiar maxim in 
ecclesiastical history, that they Avho differ least in 
religious matters hate the most. ' 

It is impossible to gain for oneself, and almost 
equally so to give to others within a short space of 
time, anything like an adequate idea either of the 
form or of the contents of the book of which Moham- 
med, whatever the general influences brought to bear 
upon his mind, was the undisputed author, and which 
still underlies the life of the vast fabric of the 
Mohammedan world. In my first Lecture I com- 
pared and contrasted the Koran with the Bible ; but 
it is necessary, perhaps, to say something more of its 
leading characteristics, or the w^ant of them. The 
Koran defies analysis, for that presupposes something 
like method in the thing to be analysed. It can 
hardly be characterised by any one epithet, for there 
is not a single Sura of any length which sustains a 
uniform character throughout. It has often been re- 
marked that there is no more striking proof of the 
discrepancies of national taste than the diametrically 



122 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Opposite opinions held by the cultivated classes of 
East and West on the literary merits of the Koran. 
Having performed repeatedly, for the purpose of 
these Lectures, a task which Bunsen and Sprenger and 
Renan all pronounce to be almost impossible — that of 
reading the Koran continuously from beginning to 
end, both in the orthodox and chronological order 
— I have acquired a better right, perhaps, than most 
people to endorse the superficial opinion that dulness 
is, to a European who is ignorant of Arabic, the pre- 
vailing characteristic of the book as a whole until 
he begins to make a minute study of it. The 
importance of the subjects it handles, the unique 
interest attaching to the speaker, and the unaffected 
reverence with which every utterance is still regarded 
by so large a portion of the world, are insufficient to 
redeem it from this general reproach. 

Endless assertions as to what the Koran is, and 
what it is not, warnings drawn from previous Ara- 
bian history, especially the lost tribes of Ad and 
Thamud ; Jewish or Arab legends of the heroes 
of the Old Testament, stories told, and, it must be 
added, often spoiled in the telling of them ; laws, 
ceremonial and moral,. civil and sumptuary; personal 
apologies ; curses showered upon Abu Lahab or the 
whole community of the Jews ; all this alternates 
with sublime revelations of the attributes of the 



HISTORY 01 KORAN 123 

Godhead, bursts of admiration for Christ Himself, 
though not for the views held of Him by His so-called 
followers, flights of poetry, scathing rebukes of the 
hypocrite, the ungrateful, the unmerciful. 

.' That the book as a whole is a medley, however it 
may be arranged, will seem only natural when we 
remember the way in which it was composed, pre- 
served, edited, and stereotyped. Dictated from time 
to time by Mohammed to his disciples, it was by them 
partly treasured in their memories, partly written 
down on shoulder-bones of mutton or oyster-shells, 
on bits of wood or tablets of stone, which, being 
thrown pell-mell into boxes, and jumbled up together, 
like the leaves of the Cumean Sibyl after a gust of 
wind, were not put into any shape at all till after the 
Prophet's death by order of Abu Bakr. The work of 
the editor consisted simply in arranging the Suras in 
the order of their respective lengths, the longest first, 
the shortest last ; and, though the book once after- 
wards passed through the editor's hands, this is sub- 
stantially the shape in which the Koran has come 
down to us. Various readings, which would seem, 
however, to have been of very slight importance, 
having crept into the different copies, a revising 
committee was appointed by order of the Kaliph 
Othman, and, an" authorized edition having been thus 
prepared ' to prevent the texts differing, like those of 



124 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

the Jews and Christians/ all previous copies were col- 
lected and burnt ! 

Nor is it to be wondered at that the principle 
of arrangement, combined with the impossibility of 
keeping the rhyme or rhythm in any translation, have 
prevented European critics, as a body, from endorsing 
the judgment, not merely of Mohammed himself, for 
that, if it had stood alone, might be looked upon as 
partial, but also of the whole Eastern world. 

* If ye be in doubt as to our revelation to our ser- 
vant, then produce a Sura like unto it, and summon 
your witnesses, God and all, if ye be men of truth.' ^ 

And again, ' If men and genii were assembled 
together that they might produce a book like the 
Koran, they must fail.' ^ 

' It is to be remarked that Mohammed and Mo- 
hammed's enemies are quite at one as to the merits of 
the book. The Arabs said that the Koran could not 
be Mohammed's Avork because it was too good. Mo- 
hammed replied to the effect that they were both right 
and wrong. They were right, for it was too good for 
Mohammed uninspired ; they were wrong, for it was 
too good to have come originally from any one but 
the All-Merciful. ^ 

Of course, by the existing arrangement, even such 

J Sura II. 21. - Sura XVII. 90. 

3 Sura XVI. 105, compared with XXV. 5, etc. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF KORAN 125 

psychological development as there was in the Koran 
has been obscured ; for, as a rule, what the editor put 
last comes really first. These are the burning utter- 
ances of the Prophet who knows no influence but the 
inspiration pent within him ; in these are the pith and 
poetry of the whole ; while the elaborate and laboured 
arguments, the apologies pro vita sua, are the product 
of the mind which the force of circumstances and the 
love of spiritual power, that most exquisite and most 
dangerous of fascinations, had driven to become con- 
scious of itself The very titles of the earlier Suras, 
the imprecations with which they abound, the imagery 
they employ, suggest the shepherd of the desert, the 
despised visionary, the poet and the prophet. ' The 
folding up,' ' the cleaving in sunder,' * the celestial 
signs,' ' the unity,' ' the overwhelming,' ' the striking,' 

* the inevitable,' ' the earthquake,' * the war-horses,' 
tell their own story. There are passages in these, 
though it must be admitted they are rare, which may 
be compared in grandeur even with some of the sub- 
limest passages of Job, of David, or of Isaiah. 

Take, for instance, the vision of the last day with 
which the eighty-first Sura, ' The folding up,' begins : 

* When the sun shall be folded up, 
And when the stars shall fall, 

And when the mountains shall be set in motion, 

And when the she-camels with young shall be neglected, 

And when the wild beasts shall be huddled together. 



126 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

And when the seas shall boil, 

And when souls shall be joined again to their bodies, 

And when the female child that had been buried alive shall ask for 

what crime she was put to death, 
And when the leaves of the Book shall be unrolled, 
And when the Heavens shall be stripped away like a skin, 
And when Hell shall be made to blaze. 
And when Paradise shall be brought near, 
Every soul shall know what it has done.' 

Allusions to the monotony of the desert ; the 
sun in its rising brightness ; the moon in its splen- 
dour ; are varied in the Koran by much more vivid 
mental visions of the Great Day when men shall be 
like moths scattered abroad, and the mountains shall 
become like carded wool of various colours, driven by 
the wind. No wonder that Labyd, the greatest poet 
of his time, forbore to enter the poetic lists with 
Mohammed when he recited to him the description of 
the infidel in the second Sura. 

* They are like one who kindleth a fire, and when it 
hath thrown its light on all around him, God taketh 
away the light and leaveth him in darkness, and they 
cannot see.' 

' Deaf, dumb, blind, therefore they shall not retrace 
their steps.' 

* They are like those who, when there cometh a 
storm-cloud out of heaven big with darkness, thunder 
and lightning, thrust their fingers into their ears 
because of the thunder-clap for fear of death. God is 
round about the infidels.' 



POETRY OF KORAN 127 

*The lightning almost snatcheth away their eyes : 
so oft as it gleameth on them, they walk on in it ; 
but when darkness closeth upon them, they stop ; 
and if God pleased, of their ears and of their 
eyes would he surely deprive them ; verily G-od is 
almighty.' 

And at the end of the same Sura, which, it is to be 
remembered, appeared quite late in the Prophet's life, 
at a period when it might have been expected that the 
cares of government would dim the brightness of the 
Prophet's visions, we find the sublime description of 
Him whom it had been the mission of his life to 
proclaim, and which is still engraved on precious stones, 
and worn by devout Mussulmans. 

' God ! there is no God but He, the Living, the 
Eternal. Slumber doth not overtake Him, neither sleep ; 
to Him belongeth all that is in heaven and in earth. 
Who is he that can intercede with Him but by His 
own permission } He knoweth that which is past and 
that which is to come unto them, and they shall not 
comprehend anything of His knowledge but so far as 
He pleaseth. His throne is extended over heaven and 
earth, and the upholding of both is no burden unto 
Him. He is the Lofty and the Great' 

Almost equally well too, as a proof of his poetic 
inspiration, might have Mohammed quoted that other 
description of Infidelity also produced late in his 



128 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

life, and pronounced by Sir William Muir and by 
Emanuel Deutsch to be one of the grandest in the 
"Avhole Koran. 

' As to the Infidels, their works are like the Serab 
<on ' the plain,^ which the thirsty traveller thinketh to 
be water, and then Avhen he cometh thereto, he findeth 
it to be nothing ; but he findeth God about him, and 
he will fully pay him his account ; for swift in taking an 
account is God ; 

' Or as the darkness over a deep sea, billows riding 
upon billows below, and clouds above ; one darkness on 
another darkness : when a man stretcheth forth his 
hand he is far from seeing it ; he to whom God doth 
not grant light, no light at all hath he.' ^ 

Strange and graphic accounts have been preserved 
to us by Ayesha of the physical phenomena attending 
the Prophet's fits of inspiration. He heard as it were 
the ringing of a bell ; he fell down as one dead ; he 
.sobbed like a camel ; he felt as though he were being 
rent in pieces, and when he came to himself he felt as 
though words had been written on his heart. And 
when Abu Bakr, ' he who would have sacrificed father 
and mother for Mohammed,' burst into tears at the 
sight of the Prophet's whitening hair, 'Yes,' said 

' i. e. the Mirage of the Desert. 

2 Sura XXIV. 39, 40. See Mmr, III. 308 ; and Deutsch, ' Islam,' 
in ' Quarterly Review,' No. 254, p. 346. 



FITS 01 INSPIRATION . 129 

Mohammed, ' Hud and its sisters, the Terrific Suras, 
have turned it white before its time.' ^ 

But in order to make the general outhne of Mo- 
hammed's system, which I am attempting to draw, as 
little imperfect as it is possible for me to make it within 
the limits I have prescribed myself, it is necessary to 
touch upon three difficult questions, which have ac- 
quired different degrees of prominence at successive 
periods in the history of Mohammedanism — questions 
which have been much misunderstood, and sometimes 
intentionally misrepresented, and which call more 
loudly even than other matters which we have been 
considering for a laborious investigation and a candid 
judgment. They need also above all things the his- 
torical sense, which does not apply the standard of the 
nineteenth century to the seventh, of Europeans to 
Asiatics, or of a high civilisation to semi-barbarism ; 
and which is content to balance the evil against the 
good, without requiring a verdict either for an absolute 
acquittal or an uncompromising condemnation. The 
three questions I refer to are the relation of Moham- 
medanism to Miracles, to Fatalism, and to wars for 
the sake of Religion. I propose in the remainder of 
to-day's Lecture to deal with these in succession ; not 
I hope consciously shirking any difficulty, or glossing 

» Suras XL, Ilud ; LVL, 'The Inevitable;' CI., 'The 
Striking.' See Muir, II. 88. 

K 



130 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

over what is unquestionably bad, but, of course, not 
professing in any degree to exhaust the subject. 

I. First, then. Miracles. Mohammedanism is a 
system in many respects unique, but in none more 
so than in this, that alone of the great religions of 
the Avorld it does not, in its authoritative docu- 
ments, rest its claims to reception upon miracles ; 
and yet the attitude of Mohammed towards the 
miraculous has been made the ground by different 
people of very conflicting accusations. Superficial 
observers up to the middle of the last century, and 
Christian missionaries of later times, whose zeal has 
not always been tempered by accurate knowledge 
of their subject, fastening on the fantastic character 
of the few miracles attributed to Mohammed by 
the pious credulity of his followers or the ' succes- 
sors,' have triumphantly torn the mask from the 
' impostor,' and have gone on to contrast, as well 
they might from their point of view, the purposeless 
character and impossibility of his supposed miracles, 
with the sober nature and the moral purpose which 
underlie the miracles of the New Testament, how- 
ever supernatural they may be. Other writers — 
White in his ' Bampton Lectures,' and Paley in his 
* Evidences of Christianity,' and Butler in his ' Ana- 
logy ' — preferring to appeal to what Mohammed said 
of himself, rather than to what was said of him by 



THE MIRACULOUS 131 

others, have driven home the contrast between Mo- 
hammedanism and Christianity by pointing out that 
Christianity is attested by supernatural manifesta- 
tions, and is therefore Divine, while Mohammedanism 
is neither the one nor the other. Let us enquire 
what the Koran itself, the only reliable authority on 
the subject, says, and then make one or two remarks 
on the general question. 

In the thirteenth Sura we read, — 

* The unbelievers say. Unless a sign be sent down 
with him from his Lord, we will not believe. But thou 
art a preacher only, O Mohammed!' 

Mohammed replies that God alone can work mira- 
cles ; and, after specifying some of them, he says : — 

' God alone knoweth that which is hidden, and that 
which is revealed. He is the great and the Most High.' 

In the seventh Sura the Infidels ask why Mo- 
hammed had not been sent wi,th miracles, like 
previous prophets } Because, replied Mohammed, 
miracles had proved inadequate to convince. Noah 
had been sent with signs, and with what effect 1 
Where was the lost tribe of Thamud } They had 
refused to receive the preaching of the prophet Saled 
unless he showed them a sign, and caused the rock to 
bring forth a living camel. He did what they asked. 
In scorn they had cut off the camel's feet, and then, 

daring the Prophet to fulfil his threats of judgment, 

K 2 



132 AfOIIAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

were found dead in their beds next morning, stricken 
by the angel of the Lord. There are some seventeen 
places in the Koran in which Mohammed is chal- 
lenged to work a sign, and he answers them all to the 
same effect. 

There are in the whole of the sacred book only two 
supposed exceptions to the attitude thus assumed by 
him ; and those who know how large a part the Miraj, 
or miraculous journey on the Borak,^ bears in popular 
conceptions of Mohammedanism will learn with sur- 
prise, if they have not gone much into the matter, 
that there is only one passage in the Koran which can 
be tortured into an allusion to the journey to heaven. 

* Praise be to Him who transferred His servant by 
night from the sacred temple to one that is more 
remote.' ^ 

To make this refer at all to the Miraj, we have to 
insert the word ' Mecca ' in one place, and Jerusalem or 
^ seventh heaven ' in another, and this, though in the 
sixtieth verse of the same Sura Mohammed tells us he 
was not sent with miracles, because people would not 
believe them ; and in the sixty-second verse express 
mention is made of a vision he had had, beyond doubt 
of this very journey ! So, too, in the verse : ' The hour 

' Borak after all means only Lightning ; the Barak of the Jews ; the 
Barca of the Carthaginians. 
2 Sura XVII. i. 



MOHAMMED S ATTITUDE TO MIRACLES 133 

hath approached and the moon hath been split in 
sunder : ' ^ people were so anxious to see an allusion to 
the extravagant story of the moon's descending on the 
Kaaba, and entering Mohammed's sleeve, that they 
forgot that ' the hour ' means ' the hour of judgment/ 
and that the tense used is the prophetic preterite. 
To the eye of the Semitic ' nabi/ whether Jewish or 
Arab, the future is as the past.^ 

Without discussing the question of miracles at 
length, I would make three remarks on the general 
subject : — First, that in a new religion the real cause 
for wonder is, not that it claims to be founded on 
miracles, but that it should ever be able to profess to 
do without them. In certain stages of the human 
mind there is no natural phenomenon which will not 
bear a supernatural interpretation. In fact, the super- 
natural is then the rule ; the natural, the exception. 
Gibbon, I think, has somewhere asked whether there 
exists a single instance in ecclesiastical history of a 
Father of the Church claiming for himself the power 
of working miracles, and I am not aware that the 
question has ever been answered in the affirmative. 
And yet we know that during many centuries there 
was hardly a Father of the Church who did not have 

* Sura LIV. i. 

^ Cf. the past tense used in Sura XCVIII., called 'The Victory' — 
' Verily, we have won for thee an undoubted victoiy,' believed to 
point to the conquest of Mecca two years later. 



134 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

miracles attributed to him by other men of equal, or 
even greater, reputed sanctity. Among many others 
I need only mention the names of St. Benedict and 
St. Martin of Tours, of St. Bernard and St. Francis of 
Assisi. They attribute even to inanimate remains, 
and to relics, which were often fictitious, powers which 
they would never dream of claiming for themselves. 
St. Augustine, whose honesty is above suspicion, tells 
us gravely that he had ascertained, on certain evi- 
dence, that some small fragments of the disinterred 
relics of St. Stephen had, in his own diocese, within 
two years, performed no less than seventy miracles, 
and three of them raisings from the dead ! St. Ber- 
nard was believed by his admirers to have excommu- 
nicated some flies which teased him, and ' they 
straightway fell down in heaps.' And if such be the 
mental atmosphere of a Church in its adolescence, 
a fortioid will an age which is capable of pro- 
ducing or receiving a new religion throw a mystic 
halo of supernaturalism round the supreme objects of 
its reverence. Even if the founder himself disclaims 
the power of working miracles, they will be thrust 
upon him in the most perfe(^t good faith by the warm 
imagination of his disciples. 

Second, and what would seem to follow from the 
first: in proportion as exact knowledge advances, the 
sphere of the supernatural is narrowed ; and there- 



RELIGIOUS INSTINCT AN ULTIMATE FACT 135 

fore a proof which is fitted for an imaginative and 
creative age is not best suited for a critical and 
scientific one. Many minds, no doubt, will always 
crave the supernatural, and they will always find 
plenty of it ; but to many, also, in an age like this, 
miracles have been a stumbling-block, and have seemed 
a reason for rejecting the religion which is made to 
rest mainly on them. Where there is a choice, it is at 
least wise to select the strongest ground we have ; nor 
is there any fear that Science will ever explain too 
much. Behind what she explains, there will always 
remain the unexplained and the unexplainable. Let 
her classify and explain the phenomena of Mind and 
Matter as she will, but will she ever be able to tell us 
what Mind and Matter are themselves .'* Let her analyse 
the springs of human action, and dissect the complex 
anatomy of the human conscience ; but the religious 
instinct will still remain, as an ultimate fact of human 
nature ; and that instinct will find without, or supply 
from its own resources, the verities with which it deals, 
the verities which supplement and explain to it the 
facts of Nature, and are not explained by them ; which 
assure us that this life is not the only life, nor death 
extinction ; and that love, the main source of human 
happiness, is not given us to make all real happiness 
impossible ; which, in a word, supply the soul with the 
supreme objects for its worship and its aspirations. 



136 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Third, I would remark that the answers given by 

Mohammed himself to those who demanded miracles, 

that God gave the power of working miracles to whom 

He pleased ; that other prophets had wrought miracles, 

and had not been believed ; that he who could not 

know even, himself adequately, could not know what 

God had hidden ; that there were greater miracles in 

nature than any which could be wrought outside of 

it ; that the Koran itself was a miracle, find at least 

one line of thought in a greater than Mohammed, 

which is not opposed to, but identical with them. 

People have raised questions about the authenticity 

and meaning of much that is in the Gospels, but by 

the rules of all critical interpretation, what they can 

least question is the genuineness and accuracy of those 

passages which the Disciples have, in their undoubted 

honesty, recorded, as it were, in spite of themselves, 

and which appear to run counter to other and loftier 

conceptions of that majestic character on Avhose par- 

tially-presei-ved utterances all Christendom still hangs. 

He who said he could of His own self do nothing ; 

it was the spirit which quickened, the flesh profiteth 

nothing ; the words that He spake unto them, they 

were spirit and they were life ; He who, when His 

disciples wondered at the withered fig tree, told them 

that the trust in God which underlay His act would 

enable even them to do greater things ; who, we are 



CHRIST'S ATTITUDE TO MIR A C IE S 137 

told, co2cldnot, in certain places, work miracles because 
of their unbelief ; and when people declined to accept 
His teaching on higher grounds, told them, with a 
touch of scorn, that they might do so if they liked on 
the lower ground, for ' His very Avorks' sake ; ' and, 
lastly, who said it Avas an evil and adulterous genera- 
tion which sought after a sign, and that no sign should 
be given it ; and that if a man believed not Moses 
and the Prophets, not even would he repent though 
one rose from the dead ; in one aspect, at all events,, 
of His teaching agreed wdth the Arabian Prophet 
whom Christians have so much discredited. He, at 
all events, treated the miraculous as subordinate to 
the moral evidences of His mission, and struck upon 
a vein of thought and touched a chord of feeling 
which, it seems to me, is reconcilable at once Avith the 
onward march of Science, and all the admitted weak- 
nesses of human nature.^ 

n. Second, P'atalism. I have spoken above of 
the extraordinary impulse given to the earlier fol- 
lowers of Mohammed by their vivid sense of God's 
personal presence with them. Inspiring, indeed, this 
principle then was ; for it must never be forgotten, 
as I hope now to prove, that the belief in an 
absolute predestination, which turns men into mere 

* Compare throughout ' Literature and Dogma, ' Caps, V. and VI. „ 
especially pages 129, 154. 



138 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

puppets, and all human life into a grim game of 
chess, wherein men are the pieces, moved by the 
invisible Hand of but a single Player, and which is 
now so general in Mohammedan countries, was, 
all appearances to the contrary, no part of the 
creed of the Prophet himself or of his immediate 
successors ; ^ and I venture, therefore, to think that 
Gibbon is wrong in tracing the desperate valour of 
the primitive Mussulmans mainly to the notion that 
since there was no chance, there need be no fear : the 
:germ, indeed, of fatalism was there, but its effects 
were as yet anything but fatalistic. 

It is of course true that there are many passages 
in the Koran which assert in the strongest way the 
foreknowledge of God. For instance, ' The fate of 
■every man have we bound about his neck ;' and the 
relations of the slain at the battle of Ohud are 
comforted by the assurance that every one must die 
at his appointed time, whether it be in his own bed 
or on the field of battle. Nor is it possible to any 
religion to reconcile the conflicting dogmas of the 
foreknowledge of God and of the free will of man. 
The New Testament does not try to do so. Most 
.assuredly our own Articles of Religion, however suc- 
cessful they may be in finding a compromise between 
opposing views on other things, fail to effect a compro- 

1 Cf. 'National Review' for July, 1858, p. 154. 



MOHAMMED NOT A FATALIST 139 

mise here. Press to its logical result either the omni- 
230tence or the omniscience of God, and what becomes 
of man's free will ? But logic is not the only criterion 
of truth, nor is it the only rule of life ; and consequently 
there is hardly a religion which does not, in words at 
all events, assert as strongly as possible God's fore- 
knowledge ; in acts, at all events, man's freedom. 
Sometimes one will be the more prominent, some- 
times the other. 

The Prophet of Arabia naturally dwelt most on 
those attributes of God which, throwing the widest 
crulf between the Creator and His creatures, would, 
once and for all, rescue the Arabs from worshipping 
what their own hands had made.^ He inculcates hope 
in adversity, and humility in success, on the ground 
that there is a supreme Ruler who never leaves the 
helm ; who knows what is really best for man when 
man himself does not ; and whose supreme will and 
power, where He asserts them, cannot be crossed by 
the efforts of the creatures of His hand. But this is 
not the only side to his teaching. He asserts that 
man is a free agent ; free to refuse or to accept the 
Divine message, responsible for his acts, and therefore 
deserving, now of punishment, now of reward. The 
future, in fact, is in his own hands, and Mohammed 

* Cf. Gobineau, ' Les Religions et les Philosophies dans I'Asie 
Centrale.' See the whole passage on this subject, p. 72, 73, 



I40 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

incessantly urges him to use his opportunities. Ah, 
the most saintly, I would almost say the most 
Christian, of all Mussulmans, pronounces those who 
say the will is not free to be heretics. W There are at 
least four sects among Mohammedans that differ from 
one another on the one point of predestination and 
free will. One of them, the Mutazalites, almost assert 
what philosophers have called the ' liberty of in- 
difference ; ' and there is little doubt that IMohammed 
himself, if the alternative had been clearly presented 
to him, would have had more in common with 
Pelagius than with Augustine, with Arminius than 
with Calvin. 

It is difficult to believe that if Mohammed had 
been the consistent fatalist he is often represented to 
have been, he would have made prayer one of the 
four practical duties enjoined upon the faithful, and 
that on an equal or even a higher footing than alms- 
giving, fasting, and pilgrimage. He is said to have 
called it the Pillar of Religion and the Key of Paradise. 
He told a tribe which, after its conversion, begged for 
a remission of some of the daily prayers enjoined 
upon them, that there could be no good in the 
religion in which there was no prayer ; and, according 
to one of his successors, prayer of itself lifts men half 
way to heaven. Now, if all events are absolutely 

^ Quoted by Gobinean, loc. cit. 



MOHAMMEUS VIEW OF PRAYER 141 

fixed by the Divine will, and foreseen by the Divine 
mind, then there is no possibility, I do not say of 
altering the fixed laws of nature, for that is a power 
which few would claim for prayer, but even of a 
man's improving in the smallest degree, by any 
acts or petitions of his, his own spiritual condition. 
Prayer would thus be a superfluity and delusion if 
explained in any other way than as an aspiration of 
the heart towards God, which, being an end in itself, 
necessarily brings its own answer with it. Noav, 
whether this last is a true view of prayer or not, it 
was certainly not Mohammed's view. In neither case 
Avould he have been quite a consistent fatalist ; but it 
is not likely that he could have overlooked the 
glaring inconsistencies involved between an absolute 
predestination on the one hand, and material answers 
to prayer on the other. The prayers that he enjoined 
five times a day ^ are still offered with full confidence 
in their efficacy by all devout Mussulmans, and the 
cry of the Muezzin, before daybreak, from a myriad 
mosques and minarets — ' Prayer is better than sleep, 
prayer is better than sleep ' — is a living witness, 
wherever the influence of the Prophet of Arabia has 

^ It is worth noticing, in passing, that the five daily prayers, like the 
rite of circumcision, though universally observed by Mussulmans, are 
not enjoined in the Koran itself. Circumcision is not even mentioned 
in the Koran : it is one of the many Pre-Islamitic practices which 
Mohammed tacitly sanctioned, y, 



142 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

extended, more vivid than the letter of the Koran 
itself, overpowering even the lethargy and quietism of 
the East, to Mohammed's belief in God's providen- 
tial government of the world, and in the freedom of 
man's will. 

Mohammed, on one occasion, complains of the 
Jews, that '■ if good fortune betide them, they say it is 
from God ; if evil betide them, they say it is from 
Mohammed :' say rather, he suggests, all is from God. 
But what, he asks in the very next verse, has come 
to these people that they are not near to understand- 
ing what is told them ? 

' Whatever good betideth thee is from God, and 
whatever betideth thee of evil is from thyself ^ 

There are the two contradictories brought face to 
face, and left fronting one another for all time ; and 
can any religion do more, and, perhaps, I may add, 
less, than this ? 

It is not difficult to see how one and the same 
doctrine of God's foreknowledge on the one hand, 
and of His actual intervention in human affairs on 
the other, may have diametrically opposite effects in 
different natures, or in even the same natures under 
different circumstances. 

* There is a tide in the afifairs of men, 
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune ; 
Omitted, all the voyage of their life 
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.' 

' Sura IV. So, 8 1. 



OPPOSITE EFFECTS OF SAME DOCTRINE 143. 

The early Mussulmans in the new burst of life 
breathed into them by Mohammed, it inspired with 
double energy and double enthusiasm, as in their best 
days it inspired the Puritans, the Covenanters, the 
Pilgrim Fathers. But to their descendants in their 
more normal state — the lethargic Soufy, the brooding 
Sepoy, the insensate Turk ; I would add, to those 
religious people who refuse to prevent the miseries and 
the diseases which Nature they think has attached to 
guilt — it furnishes with a new excuse for that life of 
inactivity to which they are already too much dis- 
posed, since they believe that they are acquiescing, as 
in duty bound, in the immutable decrees of God. ^ 

III. One more question remains to be discussed to- 
day — the wars of Islam and the relation they bear to 
Mohammed's religion. It is true that it was not till 
the Prophet found himself, to his surprise, in a position 
of power at Medina, that we hear even a whisper of 
the sword as an instrument of conversion. It is then, 
and not till then, that we are told that other prophets 
have been sent by God to attest His different attributes 
in their own person and by their miraculous acts ; but 
that men had closed their eyes to the character, and 
denied the miracles, even of Moses and of Christ. 
What remained to the last of the prophets except 

' See an eloquent passage on this subject in an article of the 
'National Review' for October, 1861. entitled the Great Arabian, p. 312, 



144 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

that he should try the last argument of the sword ? 
Was the sword then an after thought and an accidental 
appendage merely to Mohammed's religion, or was it 
an essential part ? I am inclined to think that the 
nature of the case itself and the verdict of subsequent 
experience will tend to show that, however absent it 
was from Mohammed's thoughts at first, and however 
alien to his gentle and forgiving nature, it came in the 
progress of events to some extent in his own life, and 
still more so in the lives of his successors, to be the 
latter. How this came about requires careful ex- 
planation. 

Mohammed's notion of God had never been that of 
a great moral Being who designs that the creatures 
He has created should, from love and gratitude to 
Him, become one with Him, or even assimilated to 
Him. Mohammed believed in God, feared, reverenced, 
and obeyed Him after his light, as few Jews or 
Christians ever did ; but he could hardly be said in 
the Christian, or even the Jewish sense of the word, to 
love God. It is possible that repeated acts of obedience 
to a God whom he always represents as compassionate 
and merciful might imply or result in love ; but at all 
events with him love was not, as it is in Christianity, 
the fulfilling of the law, the inspiring motive to 
action, the sum of its theology as of its morality. 
Had it been so, Mohammed would have seen more 



USE OF THE SWORD 145 

reason to doubt whether the sword could ever be its 
best ally ; but though he must in any case have seen 
that it was impossible to force men to love God, it 
may have crossed his mind that it was possible to 
force men to abstain from idolatry, to acknowledge one 
God with their lips, to fear and to obey Him, at all 
events in their outward acts. 

Had Mohammed remained master of himself — 
had he remained, that is to say, the simple Prophet 
throughout his career — it is possible, on the one hand, 
that his message would never have spread in his life- 
time beyond the walls of Mecca and Medina ; and it 
is more than probable, on the other, that his character 
might now be held up to the world as that which we 
feel the Founder of a religion ought to be ; that w^hich 
Confucius and Buddha were, and that which Mo- 
hammed himself, throughout his life at Mecca, unques- 
tionably was — a perfect model of the saintly virtues. 
There is one glory of the founder of a religion, another 
of the founder of a nation, another of the founder 
of an empire. They are better kept distinct ; and the 
limits of the human faculties are an adequate security 
against their being often found united in one person. 
It is the uncongenial mixture of earthly needs and 
heavenly aspirations which has made Mohammed at 
once a smaller and a greater man — at once more and 
less commanding than he would otherwise have been^ 

L 



146 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

What he gains as a ruler of men, he loses as a guide 
and as an example ; and people are, naturally enough, 
led to condemn the prophet for the drastic energy of 
the leader, and the leader for the shortcomings of the 
prophet. It is, perhaps, inevitable that Christians 
should do so ; for the image of Him whose kingdom 
was not of this world, who did not strive nor cry, 
whose servants were never to draw the sword in 
His defence, forces itself upon the mind, in silent 
and reproachful antithesis to the mixed and sullied 
character of the Prophet-soldier Mohammed. The 
trumpet-call is not the still small voice ; it is im- 
measurably below it : but there has been room for 
both in the development of humanity. 

/Now, on a sudden, Mohammed found himself in a 
position he had not courted, which was forced on him 
by his enemies ; and the exigencies of his exiled 
followers — the need of sustenance, the appetite for 
plunder, the desire of revenge, and the longing for 
their homes, no less than the impending attack of the 
Koreishites — drove the Prophet for the first time to 
place himself at their head ; and, for temporal pur- 
poses only, to unsheath the sword. Mohammed thus 
became a general by accident ; and the extraordinary 
success of his first ventures deepened the impression, 
already half natural to an Arab, that the sword might 
be a legitimate instrument of spiritual warfare, and 



MOHAMMED SOLDIER AS WELL AS PROPHET 147 

that God had put into his power a new means, where 
all other means, as in the case of previous prophets, 
had failed. At all events the sword, originally drawn 
for temporal purposes only, was found to have, half- 
unexpectedly, answered another end as well. It was 
found that the religion, once started by the sword, was 
• soon able to throw the sword away. The march of 
the Faith anticipated the march of the army of the 
Faithful, and the all but uniform success of the armies, 
when they had to fight, seemed to stamp the means 
used with the Divine approbation ; and so it was 
that Mohammed felt less and less scruple as to the 
use of the sword where it seemed to him to be 
wanted ; and at the close of his life, in one of the last 
Suras of the Koran, we are hardly surprised to find the 
stern command and the ' magnificent presentiment : ' 
^ ' Fight on, therefore, till there be no temptation to 
idolatry, and the religion becomes God's alone.' ^ 

The early Kaliphs obeyed the precepts and imi- 
tated the example of the warrior-Prophet, and went 
forth on their enterprise in all the plenitude of auto- 
cratic power ; there was no rivalry between Church 
and State to tie their hands, for the Kaliph was the 
head of both in one ; the State, so far as it had any 
separate existence at all, being simply a creature of 

' Sura VIII. 40. Cf. also XXII. 40, and IX. passim : perhaps 
the last Sura Mohammed composed. 

L 2 



148 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

the Church. And let us here turn aside for a moment 
to examine the relation then subsisting between the 
spiritual and temporal power, first in the Western, 
and then in the Eastern Empire, and to contrast it 
with the extraordinary concentration of all the ener- 
gies of a new-born enthusiasm, placed in the hands of 
the Kaliph. We shall then see, on the one hand, from 
what a vantage-ground the Arabs, at that precise 
moment, entered the lists to contend with Christen- 
dom ; but, on the other, we shall note how few are the 
men, and how rare the occasions on which power of 
any kind can afford to dispense with those checks 
which are a condition of its permanence, and which 
alone can prevent it from developing into unbridled 
tyranny, or dying of inanition. 

The Christianity of the West then had, centuries 
before this, organized an iniperiuin in imperio which 
afforded a substantial check to the tyranny of the 
Emperors, and, by its moral majesty, could restrain a 
savage barbarian even in the full career of conquest. 
Ambrose had sternly rebuked Theodosius ; Innocent 
had mitigated the horrors of the sack of Rome by 
Alaric ; Leo had turned back Attila, and half-dis- 
armed Genseric. The transference of the seat of 
Empire to Constantinople forced the Bishops of Rome 
into a political prominence which would not otherwise 
« have belonged to them ; and, in process of time, 



SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL POWER 149 

the Spiritual power thus fortified began to contend, 
on something like equal terms, with the temporal, 
Gregory the Great, whose pontificate ended shortly 
before the * call ' of the Prophet of Arabia, was the 
virtual sovereign of Rome, able to protect it alike 
from the ferocity of the Lombards, and from the pre- 
tentious weakness of the Exarchs. Before long the 
sacerdotal monarchs who reigned on the Tiber were 
to be seen deposing by right Divine one Frankish 
dynasty which ruled upon the Rhine ; setting up an- 
other of their own creation ; and, finally, in the person 
of Charles the Great, giving new body to the phantom 
of the ancient Roman Empire which had never ceased 
to flit before the mind of Europe, and fancying, in 
their superb audacity, that a breath might overthrow 
what a breath had made. And by the time that 
the Eternal City itself heard the dreaded Tecbir 
at their gates, it Avas to a Pope and not a Caesar — 
a Pope, too, elected in hot haste, without even the 
formal sanction of the Caesar — that Rome owed her 
safety ! * 

But the religion of the Eastern Empire, to quote 
Gibbon's epigram, could teach men only ' to suffer and 
to yield.' The Patriarch of Constantinople, unlike the 
Patriarch of Rome, was the puppet of the Emperor, 
endorsed his worst deeds, or was swept away if he 

i Leo IV. 



150 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

objected to them.^ And the Saracens who besieged 
the ceremonious Emperor of the East in his own capi- 
tal must have enjoyed, if they could read, the form of 
service, prescribed by Church and State together, for 
the day on which the Emperor should trample on the 
necks of the captive Mussulmans, while the singers 
were to chant, 'Thou hast made mine enemies my 
footstool,' and the people were to shout forty times 
the ' Kyrie Eleeson.' ^ The crusading spirit which 
might have been evoked by a proposition of the great 
Emperors, Nicephorus and Zimisces, to give a martyr's 
crown to those who fell in battle with the infidels, was 
checkmated by a counter-proposition of the Patriarch 
to exclude from the highest rites of the Church all 
those who took up arms, even in self-defence.^ Had 
it been otherwise, the period of the Crusades might 
have been anticipated by more than a hundred years ! 
We see, therefore, that in the West, by the time that 
the tide of Arab conquest had spread from Mecca 
to Gibraltar, the spiritual power was independent of 

* See the history of the Iconoclastic Emperors generally, a.d. 
717-841, and their dealings with the Patriarchs of Constantinople. 
Read especially, on the one hand, the account of the dastardly submis- 
sion of the Patriarch Anastasius to Leo, and, on the other, the horrible 
cruelties inflicted on the Patriarch Constantine by Copronymus. 
Milman, II. Chap. VII. 

' See the ' De Ceremoniis Aula; et Ecclesi?e Byzantinse ' of Con- 
stantine Porphyrogenitus, II. 19 ; quoted by Gibbon, Chap. LIII. 116, 
and note. 

^ See Gibbon, loc. cit. 



KALIPHS, SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL RULERS 151 

temporal, and was often able to control or neutralise 
its action, even in temporal affairs ; while in the East, 
on which the storm was first to burst, it was almost 
non-existent ; and if ever it did cause its voice to be 
heard, the cry it uttered was that of Phocion, not of 
Demosthenes — of Jeremiah, not of Isaiah ; that of sub- 
mission to the inevitable, not of resistance to the 
bitter end. 

But with the Saracens the case was different. The 
God of Mohammed, like the God of the wanderers of 
the wilderness, and unlike the God of Christendom, 
was pre-eminently the God of battles. The early 
Mussulmans shed tears when held back within their 
leashes from the battle ; and the Emperor Leo, who 
condemned the Mohammedan idea of God, must have 
secretly envied the vigour that it brought. Military 
zeal under a tried leader is a strong passion, so is 
religious enthusiasm ; and never probably in the history 
of the world have these two passions burned with so 
consuming a flame as they did in the breasts of the 
early followers of Mohammed. The civil, the religious, 
and the military were as indissolubly blended together 
in his system as they were in mediaeval chivalry. It 
was not so much religion that became warlike, as war, 
the normal condition of the Arabs on a small scale, 
now itself became religious, with the whole world for 
its battle ground. Probably in no army in the world, 



152 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

not even among the Scotch Covenanters, nor among 
Cromwell's Ironsides, did religious exercises so form 
part of the military discipline, and religious enthusiasm 
so infuse an esprit de corps. 

The early battles of Islam, Bedr and Ohud, Kade- 
sla and Nehavend, the Yermuk and Aiznadin ; its 
early sieges, Bozra and Damascus, Jerusalem and 
Aleppo, Memphis and Alexandria, are more than 
Homeric in the reckless valour and the chivalrous 
devotion that they exhibit. And it is to be re- 
membered that they are in the main historical. 
Kaled is the Achilles of the siege of Damascus, Amrou 
of that of Memphis, Dames of Aleppo. At Bedr, 
Omeir, a mere stripling, who, fearing that he might be 
rejected on account of his youth, had managed to join 
the small army of the Faithful unknown to Moharnmed, 
flung away the dates he was eating with the vow that 
he would eat the next in the presence of God. ' Para- 
dise is before you, the devil and hell-fire in your 
rear,' was the exhortation of the generals at the battle 
of Yermuk. The Faithful courted death with the 
ecstasy of martyrs, and received a martyr's reward. 
At Aiznadin, Derar maintained a flying fight single 
handed against thirty infidels, and killed seventeen of 
their number. At the siege of Damascus, a Saracen 
heroine, who had followed her husband, Aban, to the 
holy war, saw him killed by her side, stopped to bury 



RELIGIOUS AND MILITARY ENTHUSIASM 153, 

him, and then fought on in the post of danger till she 
slew the famous archer who had killed her husband. 
Nor is there any period in the history of Mohamme- 
danism, late or early, in which the intensity of the 
crusading spirit does not on occasion manifest itself 
It is God's battle that each Mussulman is fighting, and 
as God may will, he is ready for either event, for victory 
or defeat, for life or death. In the Crusades them- 
selves, when Christendom seemed to be seized with a 
double portion of the Mohammedan spirit, by the 
confession of the Christians, the generosity, the reck- 
-less valour, the self-sacrifice, and the chivalry, were 
not all on one side. Richard of England and 
Frederick Barbarossa found their match in Saladin ; 
and even the history of our own Empire in India 
teems with proofs that the vital spark of fanaticism 
is latent only, not extinct. 

Whenever hitherto in the history of Mohamme- 
danism, the belief has grown feeble that the Faithful 
hold a commission from on high to put down evil,. 
wherever it shows itself, with a strong hand, it 
must be admitted that the religion itself has propor- 
tionately failed to do its proper work, both as a com- 
pelling and as a restraining power. In the Middle 
Ages the vitality and energy of Mohammedanism 
evidenced itself most clearly, not in Arabia, or 
Persia, or Africa, w^here its success was most complete,. 



154 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

but in the Christian border lands, in Spain, in Pales- 
tine, in Asia Minor, where the crusading spirit was 
most evoked. Where there was no outlet for an 
active, and even a material warfare, against what was 
believed to be evil, there corruption crept in, and 
stealthily paralysed all the energies of Mussulman 
society. ' Corruptio optimi fit pessima! Ommiade, and 
Abbasside, and Fatimite Kaliphs ; Ghaznevide, and 
Seljukian, and Ottoman Sultans passed through the 
same dreary stages of luxury and decay ; and the 
government that now represents, or misrepresents, the 
Kaliphate, and is by most people foolishly supposed 
to be the main support of Islam, originally, in the 
hands of men like Abu Bakr, or Omar, the best, 
the simplest, and the most republican of all absolute 
governments, has, in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, 
ever since their faith ceased to be militant, become 
the most hopeless of despotisms, since the abject 
submission to the ruler remains, while all reason for 
submission has vanished.^ / 

In the eyes of many the admission I have frankly 
made that the propagation of religion by the sword has 
been an essential part of Mohammedanism will serve to 
condemn it at once, and so in the abstract and from 
the highest point of view it ought. The sword is a 

* See this line of thought developed by Maurice, ' Religions of the 
World,' p. 29 sq. I have done little more in this paragraph than con- 
dense and illustrate his argument. 



CHARACTER OF WARS OF ISLAM 155 

rough surgical instrument in any case ; but the doc- 
trine that rehgion can ever be propagated by it, 
paradoxical as it sounds now, has seemed a truism in 
more ages than one ; and though the Arabs were 
semi-barbarians, the conquered nations were con- 
strained to admit that in their conquests they were 
not barbarous. /Their wars were not mere wars of 
devastation, like those of Alaric or Genseric in earlier 
times, or of Zenghis Khan or Tamerlane in later. 
It was the savage boast of Attila, the genius of 
destruction, the 'scourge of God,' that the grass never 
grew where his horse had once trodden. But, of the 
Mohammedan conquests, it would rather be true to 
say that after the first wave of invasion had swept by, 
two blades of grass were found growing where one 
had grown before; like the thunderstorm, they fer- 
tilised while they destroyed ; and from one end of the 
then known world to the other, with their religion 
they sowed seeds of literature, of commerce, and of 
civilisation. And as these disappeared, in the lapse 
of years, in one part of the Mussulman world, they 
reappeared in another. When they died out, with 
the dying of the Abbasside Kaliphate, along the banks 
of the Tigris and Euphrates, they revived again on 
the Guadalquivir and Guadiana. To the splendours 
and civilisation of Damascus succeeded Bagdad ; to 
Bagdad, Cairo; to Cairo, Cordova. / 



I 
156 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Mohammedanism has been accused of hostiUty to 
the growth of the human intellect. It may have been 
so in its earliest days, when Omar, as the story goes, 
condemned the Alexandrian Library to the flames 
by his famous dilemma : * If these books agree with 
the Book of God, they are useless ; if they disagree, 
they are pernicious ; and in either case they must be 
destroyed.' It may be so whenever there is a passing 
outburst of fanaticism ; but it is not so in its essential 
nature, nor has it been so historically, not even in its 
wars. The religion which has declared that ' the ink 
of the learned is as precious as the blood of the 
martyrs ; ' ^ and which declares that at the Day of 
Decision a special account will be given of the use 
made of the intellect, cannot fairly be accused of 
obscurantism. It was not so when, during the darkest 
period of European history, the Arabs for five hundred 
years held up the torch of learning to humanity. It 

^ Quoted by Gobineau, p. 26. So, too, Abulpliaragius, in his 
'Dynasties,' says that Almamun, Kah'ph of Bagdad, invited learned men 
to his court because they were the elect of God, whose lives were 
devoted to the development of the mind. (See Gibbon, VII. 34.) 
Against the destruction of the Alexandrian library by Omar may fairly 
be set the destruction by the Crusaders of an immense library at 
Tripoli, in Palestine. The General, finding that the first room of the 
library contained the Koran only, ordered the whole library to be 
burnt. So, too, Cardinal Ximenes, on entering the Moorish capital, 
showed that a crass fanaticism is not the prerogative of one religion only, 
by his order to destroy the vast collection of Arabic MSS. there, 
with the exception of 300 medical works, which he reserved for his 
own university. 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 157 

was the Arabs who then ' called the Muses from 
their ancient seats ; ' who collected and translated the 
writings of the great Greek masters ; who understood 
the geometry of Apollonius, and wielded the weapons 
found in the logical armoury of Aristotle. It was the 
Arabs who developed the sciences of Agriculture 
and Astronomy, and created those of Algebra and 
Chemistry ; who adorned their cities with colleges and 
libraries, as well as with mosques and palaces ; who 
supplied Europe with a school of philosophers from 
Cordova, and a school of physicians from Salerno. 
When we condemn the Mohammedan wars, let us at 
least remember what of good they brought with them. 

Nor is Mohammedanism the only religion which has 
tried to propagate itself by the sword. It is true, of 
course, that a holy war waged by Christians is in direct 
contravention of the spirit of their Founder, while one 
waged by Mohammedans is in accordance with both 
the practice and the precept of the Prophet, and so far 
there is no parallel at all between the two religions. 
The means authorised by Christ for the spread of His 
religion were moral and spiritual only. The means 
authorised by Mohammed were persuasion and ex- 
ample first ; but, failing these, the sword./ 

Yet, historically speaking, the contrast between 
the practice of Christians and Mohammedans has not 
been so sharp as is often supposed. The Saxon wars 



158 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

of Charles the Great were avowedly religious wars, and 
differed chiefly from the Syrian wars of Omar and 
of Ali, from the African wars of Amrou and Akbah, 
and the Spanish wars of Moussa and of Tarik, in that 
they were much more protracted and vastly less suc- 
cessful Otto the Great, the best of Charles's succes- 
sors, used the sword with vigour to extend the external 
profession of Christianity among the Sclavonian tribes 
who dwelt along the shores of the Baltic. The Mediaeval 
Papacy, whatever its other services to progress, was 
never backward to unfurl the standard of a religious 
war, whether against the common enemy of Christen- 
dom, or, as more often happened, against a sect of 
heretics, the Albigenses or the Waldenses, nearer home. 
Nor, in point of ferocity, is it clear that religious wars 
waged by Christians will compare favourably with 
those of Mohammedans. The Mohammedan wars 
were never internecine. Even on the field of battle 
the conquering Mussulman allowed his conquered foe 
the two other alternatives of conversion or of tribute. 
When Abu Bakr first invaded Syria, he charged his 
troops not to mutilate the dead, not to slay old men, 
women, and children, not to cut down fruit-trees, not 
to kill cattle unless they were needed for food ; and 
these humane precepts served like a code of laws of 
war during the career of Mohammedan conquest. And 
this, be it remembered, among Orientals, who had 



RELIGIOUS WARS OF CHRISTIANS 159 

always been remarkable for their disregard of human 
life. 'When we remember, on the other hand, the 
massacre of 4,500 Pagan Saxons in cold blood by- 
Charles the Great — when we remember the famous 
answer by which the Papal Legate, in the Albigensian 
war, quieted the scruples of a too conscientious 
general, ^Kill all, God will know His own' — when- 
we recall the Spanish Inquisition, the Conquest of 
Mexico and Peru, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
and the sack of Magdeburg by Tilly, we shall be 
disposed never, indeed, to justify religious wars, 
but to point out that, of the religious wars which the 
world has seen, the Mohammedan are certainly not 
the worst — in their object, in their methods, or in their 
results. / 

Nor is the extermination of moral evil in all cases 
an unworthy object of war. There are occasions even 
in our modern civilisation, and in an era of non- 
intervention, when one longs to feel that the sword a 
nation wields may be, in their eyes at all events, the 
sword of the Lord and of Gideon. An unselfish war 
to put down the slave trade or the opium traffic, to 
counteract some ' Holy Alliance ' of Emperors against 
the rights of peoples, to prevent a giant iniquity like 
the partition of Poland, is perhaps the only kind of 
war, except those of self-defence, to which the spirit of 
Christianity is not opposed. Christianity is opposed 



i6o MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

to wars of aggression, to dynastic wars, and, above 
all, to religious wars ; for a religious war rests upon 
the irreligious assumption that one fallible man holds 
a fiat from Omnipotence to step between another 
human soul and God ; and to enforce his partial views 
of truth upon a fellow-mortal, who, for aught he 
knows, may have as wide a prospect, and as deep an 
insight, as he has himself ' Deoritni injuries Deis curce' 
. The sword may silence ; it cannot convince : it 
may enforce hypocrisy ; it can never force belief. 
But this has not always seemed so self-evident ; and 
I say it deliberately and with all the force of convic- 
tion, compared with the war of the Confederate States 
in the nineteenth century for the perpetuation of 
slavery, compared with our own Japanese wars for the 
extension of our trade, our Chinese wars for the sale 
of our opium, and our miserable African wars waged 
for the possession of a territory which we bought, 
and had no moral right to buy, from those who sold 
what they had no moral right to selV the Mohamme- 
dan wars for the propagation of a comparatively pure 
religion and a higher morality were, in their time and 
according to their light, inasmuch as they were not 
purely selfish, I do not say excusable, but they were 
at least intelligible and natural. 

Here I must close for to-day. What of good and 

^ See Appendix to Lecture III. 



WHAT WARS ARE CHRISTIAN? i6i 

what of evil the world owes to Mohammed ; what is 
the condition and what the prospects of Moham- 
medanism now ; what, as a matter of fact, is the 
historical connection between Mohammedanism and 
Christianity — its points of difference as well as of 
resemblance ; finally, and most important of all, how 
that connection ought to be regarded by Christians,' 
and under what conditions or modifications the two 
great creeds may work together, or, if needs be, 
apart, for their common object, the general good of 
humanity — these are some of the points I hope to 
be able to discuss in my fourth and concluding 
Lecture. 



M 



i62 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 



LBCTUEE IV. 



March 7, 1874. 



MOHAMMEDANISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 



Say unto the Christians, their God and my God is one. — 

The Koran. 

^f 'li](TQVQ ELTTfj Mr) KouXvers avTov' og yap ovic tan icaB' I'jiim'y vwep 

riixwv iariv. — St. MaRK. 

It may have been observed that in attempting, in 
my last Lecture, to deal with some of the questions 
connected with Mohammedanism, such as miracles, 
fatalism, religious wars, which have much perplexed 
the Christian mind, I omitted to say anything on a 
point which, more even than any of these, has scandal- 
ised those who view Mohammedanism from a distance: 
I mean the notions Mohammedans have formed of a 
future state. The omission was not altogether acci- 
dental, for I am inclined to think that too much stress 
has been laid upon these notions, no less by Moham- 
med's apologists than by his critics ; more stress than 
the Koran itself, and more even than the current 
Mohammedan belief, will warrant. But, remembering 



THE FUTURE LIFE OF ISLAM 163 

a remark of Sprenger's/ that, although Islam has been 
described in many books, yet educated people have 
not got much further in the knowledge of it than that 
the Turks are Mohammedans, and allow polygamy, I 
think it will be well to add a few words to counteract 
the common notion, which I should be disposed to 
place on a par with this, that the Paradise of the 
Mohammedans is nothing niore than the enjoyment 
of polygamy, with its earthly drawbacks and limita- 
tions removed. 

So much has been said and written about the 
gross nature of Mohammed's Paradise, the black-eyed 
Houris, the perfumes and the spices, with which his 
imagination furnished it, that ordinary people may be 
excused for believing that it was mainly, if not wholly, 
sensual. But this is not, in the main, a true, and still 
less is it an adequate, account of the matter. The 
passages are few in number in which Mohammed 
dwells much on these aspects of the future, and, even 
in these, much of w^hat is said is explained by ortho- 
dox Mohammedans to be merely Oriental imagery, 
while some of it is especially suitable — the bubbling 
fountains and the shady gardens above all — to the inha- 
bitants of a dry and thirsty land, such as Arabia is. ^ 

1 Sprenger, Vol. II. Chap. XI. p. 18. 

^ See Sale's 'Introduction,' p. 73; and Lane's 'Modem Egyp- 
tians,' I. Chap. III. 84. 

M 2 



i64 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Few people now put a literal interpretation upon 
the gorgeous imagery and the glowing colours used 
in the Book of Revelation to describe the Celestial 
City ; and every one will admit that in all religions, 
even the most spiritual, the circumstances of this life 
must necessarily, to some extent, lend both form and 
colour to the views of the life to come. The Red 
Indian dreams of a heaven behind the cloud-topped 
hills, embosomed in woods, wherein his faithful dog 
will bear him company. The fierce Norseman hoped 
to be admitted after death to the Hall of Odin, and 
there, reclining on a couch, to drink ale for ever from 
the skulls of his enemies whom he had slain in battle. 
The earnest Methodist pictures to himself a place 

* Where congregations ne'er break up. 
And Sabbaths never end,' 

for the simple reason that he finds his highest 
spiritual happiness in these things on earth. A 
polygamous people could hardly have pictured to 
themselves a heaven without polygamy. It would 
never even have occurred to them that such a thing 
was possible, since few of them had ever known a 
society on earth which was without it ; nor do I sup- 
pose that any individual Christian who has ever 
known the luxury of home affection, has been able to 
accept in any literal sense the doctrine that, in the 



THE FUTURE LIFE OF OTHER RELIGIONS 165 

future world, there are to be no exclusive attachments,^ 
for the simple reason, again, that without individual 
love no human heart can conceive of the possibility 
of any happiness as complete or real. 

Again, it is to be remembered that much that is 
material, or even gross, in the Mohammedan concep- 
tion of a future life is due, not to Mohammed, but to 
Mohammed's successors ; and it is not the least of 
the enigmas that attach to the extraordinary and 
unique character of the Prophet, that his views of a 
future state are never more spiritual than at the time 
when, according to the common theory, he had most 
entirely, and, in fact, he had to some extent, fallen 
away from his austerely moral life. Contrast the tone 
of the Suras, referring to this subject, which were written 
at Mecca early in his life,^ with the third, for instance, 
which was written at Medina many years later. 

' Fair,' says he, ' in the sight of men are the plea- 
sures of women and children ; fair are the treasured 
treasures of gold and silver ; and fine horses ; and 
flocks ; and corn-fields ! Such is the enjoyment of 
this world's life. But God ! goodly is the home with 
Him! 

' Shall I tell you of better things than these, pre- 
pared for those who fear God in His presence } Theirs 

1 St. Matt. XXII. 30. 

2 SuraLV. 44-58; LVI. 17-36; LXXVI. 12-22. 



1 66 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

shall be gardens beneath which the rivers flow, and 
in which they shall abide for aye, and wives of stain- 
less purity, and acceptance with God, for God regard- 
eth His servants. 

* They who say, O our Lord, we have indeed be- 
lieved, pardon our sins, and keep us from the torment 
of the fire. 

' The patient are they, and the truthful, the lowly, 
and the charitable, and they who ask for pardon as 
each day breaks.' ^ 

Surely here, as elsewhere, and increasingly so as 
the Prophet drew near his end, it is the presence of 
God, the knowledge of Him, the eternal Salaam or 
Peace with which they shall salute one another, the 
purity of love, and not its sensuality, which are the 
most prominent ideas. 

Heaven and hell, indeed, were realities to the 
Mohammedan mind in a sense in which they have 
hardly ever been to any other nation. With a more 
than Dantesque realism, Mohammed saw the tortures 
of the lost no less than the bliss of the faithful. 

* They shall dw^ell,' he says, ' amidst burning winds 
and in scalding water, under the shade of a black 
smoke which is no shade, neither cool nor grateful, 

and they shall surely eat of the fruit 

of the tree Ez-Zakkoum, and shall fill their bellies 

» Sura XIII. 12-15. 



REALITY OF FUTURE LIFE TO MOHAMMED i67 

therewith, and they shall drink thereon boiling water, 
even as a thirsty camel drinketh.' ^ 

And again, he says : 

' They shall have garments of fire fitted unto them, 
their bowels shall be dissolved thereby, and also their 
skins, and they shall be beaten with maces of iron.' ^ 

And once more, in one of his very early Suras, 
which, if it is memorable for nothing else, is memor- 
able for its superb audacity, when we recollect that 
as yet Mohammed's prophetic claims were treated 
only with contemptuous indifference, and he himself 
was a mere outcast : 

*Woe be,' he says, 'on that day to those who 
accused the prophets of imposture ! 

* It shall be said unto them. Go ye into that which 
ye denied as a falsehood. 

* Go ye into the shadow of th^ smoke of hell, 
which, though it ascend in three columns, 

' Shall not shade you from the heat, neither shall it 
be of service against the flames ; 

* But it shall cast forth sparks as big as towers, 

* And their colour shall be like unto that of red 
camels. 

* Woe be on that day unto those who accuse the 
prophets of imposture.' ^ 

J Sura LVI. 41-56. 2 gura XXII. 20-21. 

' Sura LXXVII. 29 to end. The ' Woe be,' &c. is a refrain which, 
recurs ten times in the Sura. 



i68 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

' What shall be our reward/ asked his earliest 
followers of Mohammed, ' if we fall in battle ? ' 
' Paradise/ said the Prophet, without the slightest 
hesitation. In the war of Tabuk his men demurred to 
marching because it was harvest time. ' Your harvest 
it lasts for a day,' said Mohammed ; ' what will come 
of your harvest through all eternity ? ' They com- 
plained of the burning sun. ' Hell is hotter,' said the 
Prophet, and on they went.^ 

That it was desirable to dwell with so much per- 
sistence upon the enormous issues involved as re- 
gards the future life, in every act and thought of this, 
I am far from asserting ; since self-interest, how- 
ever enlightened, and however refined, however even 
spiritualised it may be, is self-interest still. But at all 
events it was stern reality to Mohammed and to his 
followers. The future was all as real and as instant 
to him as it was to the Apostles when, expecting, as 
they did, from the interpretation they put upon 
Christ's words, to see Him in their own lifetime 
coming in the clouds of heaven, they drove home their 
warnings by bidding men flee from ' the wrath to come/ 
In every successive crisis of the Christian Church, it 
has been the belief of Christians that the darkest hour 



* Carlyle's ' Heroes,' p. 239 ; and Sura IX. 82, &c. In this 
expedition water was so scarce that the fainting troops were obhged to 
kill the camels and drink the water out of their stomachs. 



LEGITIMATE INFLUENCE OF A FUTURE LIFE 169. 

Is that before the dawn, and it has been used, however 
mistakenly, yet with effect and with sincerity, to com- 
fort the depressed, to awaken the sleeping, and ta 
arouse the dead. ' Finem simin niundtts jam non 
nuiiciat sohcm, sed oste?idit,' says St. Gregory amidst 
the devastations of the Lombards. ' Appropinquante- 
jam 77itindi iermino^ is the heading of even legal 
documents amidst the deeper depression of the tenth 
century caused by the ravages of the Hungarians by 
land and the Norsemen by sea. This is the burden 
of St. Bernard's hymns, of Savonarola's preachings, 
of Bunyan's allegories. Truly, if Mohammed sinned 
at all in this respect, he sinned in good company. 

But the future world, ever present though it was 
to the minds of the early Mohammedans, did not 
supply the motive by which they were really inspired. 
A selfish hope of Heaven, and a slavish fear of Hell, 
may act as a ' negative stimulus ' — may possibly teach 
passive resistance to temptation' — but it does not 
nerve the arm to strike, or quicken the eye to see. 
Perhaps, indeed, the highest heroism of all, that 
which consists in absolute conscious self-sacrifice or 
self-annihilation for the good of others — the heroism 
of the ideal just man in the second book of Plato's 
ReptLblic ; the heroism of Moses when he prayed to 
be blotted out of the Book that God had written ; the 
heroism of a greater than Moses when He died upon 



I70 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

the cross — is impossible to those who believe firmly 
in a future life, the happiness or misery of which is to 
be exactly determined by the life here. But there 
may be true heroism even short of the truest ; and 
all true heroism, even if it cannot deny or forget its 
reward, is stimulated not so much by the reward as 
by the difficulty of obtaining it. The reward, to use 
an Aristotelian phrase, is an ^in'yi'yvoiJisvov tl teXos 
something thrown in, an after-thought and accessory 
merely ; and this is what a future life was to the 
primitive warriors of the Crescent. 

Nor is it true, in any sense of the word, that Mo- 
hammed's is an easy or sensual religion. With its 
frequent fasts, its five prayers a day, its solitudes, 
its almsgivings, its pilgrimages, even in the tortures 
of Indian fakirs and the bowlings of Mecca der- 
vishes, which are the abuse, and not the use, of the 
religion — it certainly does not appeal much to the 
laziness, or the sensuality, or the selfishness of man- 
kind. 

In his capacity even of temporal ruler, Mohammed 
rarely gave material rewards to his followers. Abu 
Bakr, Ali, Omar, Hamza, when in his early days they 
ranged themselves as friends round the then friendless 
enthusiast, sacrificed, as it must have appeared to 
them, all their worldly hopes ; they little thought that 
they were enrolling themselves in that most select 



WAS ISLAM A SENSUAL RELIGION? 171 

band of heroes who may be said to have made 
History. On one occasion, late in his life, Moham- 
med did give some material rewards to recent and 
perhaps half-hearted converts, but the exception only 
proved the rule, and that in the most memorable 
manner. The Helpers of Medina were naturally dis- 
satisfied, but Mohammed recalled them to their alle- 
giance by words which went straight from his heart 
to theirs : that he had given things of the world to 
those who cared for such things, but to them he had 
given himself. Others returned home with sheep 
and camels, the Helpers with the Prophet of God. 
Verily, if all the men of the earth went one way, and 
the Helpers of Medina another, he would go the way 
of the Helpers of Medina. ^ The Helpers burst into 
tears, and exclaimed that they were more than 
satisfied with what he had given them. And, just 
before his death, Mohammed commended these same 
Helpers of Medina to the protection of the exiles who 
had accompanied him from Mecca. ^ Hold in honour/ 
said he, ' the Helpers of Medina ; the number of be- 
lievers may increase, but that of the Helpers never 
can. ^ They were my family, and with them I found 

• Alluded to in Sura LIX. 8 and 9, and VIII. 42. See Muir, IV. 

151-154- 

^ Cf. Herodotus iii. II9. 5 ^aaiXev, avrjp fiiv (jloi tcu &\Kos yivoiro, el 
daifjLcov 60eAot, Koi riKva ckXXa, ci ravra airofidXoifxi.' irarphs Se koI /xrjTphs 
ovK €Ti fxev ^ooSvTuv uBeA^ehs Uu &\Xos ovdeyl rp6ir(f "y^voiro. Cf. also 
Soph. Aniigofie, 909-912. 



172 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

a home ; do good to those who do good to them, and 
break friendship with those who are hostile to them.' 

Perhaps there is no remark one has heard more 
often about Mohammedanism than that it was so suc- 
cessful because it was so sensual ; but there is none more 
destitute of truth, as if any religion could owe its perma- 
nent success to its bad morality ! I do not say that its 
morality is perfect, or equal to the Christian morality. 
Mohammed did not make the manners of Arabia, and 
he was too wise to think that he could either unmake 
or remake them all a.t once. Solon remarked of his 
own legislation that his laws were not the best that he 
could devise ; but that they were the best the 
Athenians could receive; and his defence has generally 
been accepted as a sound one. Moses took the 
institutions of a primitive society as he found them — 
the patriarchal power, internecine war, blood feuds, 
the right of asylum, polygamy and slavery — and did 
not abolish any one of them ; he only mitigated their 
worst evils, and so unconsciously prepared the way in 
some cases for their greater permanence, in others for 
their eventual extinction. 

/ In like manner the religion of Christ did not sweep 
into oblivion any national or political institutions. 
He contented Himself with planting principles in the 
hearts of His followers which would, when the time was 
ripe for it, work out their abolition. Willing to sow if 



ATTITUDE TOWARDS EXISTING INSTITUTIONS 173 

others could reap, to labour if others could enter into 
His labours, He cast into the ground the grain of 
mustard seed, and was content, with the eye of faith 
alone, to see it grow into the mighty tree whose 
branches should overspread the world, and whose 
leaves should be for the healing of the nations./ With 
sublime self-restraint and self-sacrifice, governed by 
His thought for the boundless possibilities of the 
future of His Church, rather than by the impulse of 
the moment. He forbore to denounce in so many words 
the inveterate evils of the Roman Empire, which must 
have gone to His soul's soul — foreign conquest, tyranny, 
the amphitheatre, slavery. He even used words which 
have been wrongly construed to mean that at all times 
passive obedience is a duty, and that the people have 
nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. Nor 
has the Christian Church — sections of which have for 
strange and various, but intelligible, reasons, canonised 
a Constantine and a Vladimir, a Cyril and a Charles 
the Great, a Dunstan and a Becket — ever attached the 
name of Saint to some who, in the fulness of time, have 
carried out far more fully and in spirit Christ's work, 
albeit in seeming contradiction to the letter of the law 
which inculcated submission to existing powers and in- 
stitutions — toaTelemachusor aTheodoric,to an Alfred 
or a Wilberforce. And yet no Christian will deny that 
the monk Telemachus, who threw himself between the 



174 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

swords of the gladiators, and, braving the fury of the 
spectators athirst for blood, accomplished by his death 
what his life could never have won, did a deed which all 
the ' Acta Sanctorum ' could be searched to parallel. 

Now Mohammed was a legislator and a statesman, 
as well as the founder of a religion ; and why is the 
defence which we allow to Solon, and the praise we 
bestow upon the limited scope of the Mosaic legisla- 
tion, denied to Islam ? 

Polygamy is, indeed, next to caste, the most 
blighting institution to which a nation can become a 
prey. It pollutes society at the fountain-head, for the 
family is the source of all political and of all social 
virtues. Mohammed would have more than doubled 
the debt of gratitude the Eastern world owes to him had 
he swept it away, but he could not have done so, even 
if he had fully seen its evils. It is not fair to represent 
polygamy as a part of Mohammedanism any more 
than it is fair to represent slavery as a part of 
Christianity. The one co-exists with the other with- 
out being mixed with it, even as the muddy Arve 
and the clear Rhone keep their currents distinct long 
after they have been united in one river-bed. Perhaps 
it is strange that they ever could have co-existed, 
even for a day ; but we have to deal with facts as they 
are ; and it is a fact that slavery has co-existed with 
Christianity, nay, has professed to justify itself by 



TREATMENT OF WOMEN 175 

Christianity, even till this nineteenth century. Mo- 
hammed could not have made a tabula rasa of Eastern 
society, but what he could do he did. He at least put 
strict limitations on the unbounded license of Eastern 
polygamy,^ and the facility of Eastern divorce.^ If the 
two social touchstones of a religion are the way in 
which, relatively to the time, it deals with the weaker 
sex, and the way in which it regards the poor and the 

1 

oppressed, Mohammed's religion can stand the test.* 
/He improved the condition of women by freeing them 
from the arbitrary patriarchal power of the parents or 
the heirs of their husbands, by inculcating just and kind 
treatment of them by their husbands themselves, by 
giving them legal rights in case of unfair treatment, 
and by absolutely prohibiting the incestuous marriages 
which were rife in the times of ignorance, and the still 
more horrible practice of the burying alive of female 

1 Sura IV. 3, &c. 

2 Sura IV. 39 and 127, XXXIII. 48, 52, &c. 

' Among many other illustrations of this see [a) the oath taken early 
in his life with other Koreishites, ' to defend the oppressed so long as 
a drop of water remained in the ocean,' an act the remembrance of 
which Mohammed said ' he would not exchange for the choicest camel 
in Arabia ; ' {b) the account given by Jafar to the Najashy of Abys- 
sinia of the change wrought by Mohammed among his followers ; 
perhaps the noblest and truest summary we have of the moral teaching 
of the Prophet; (<r) the pledge of Acaba, a.d. 621, taken by his first 
converts from Medina ; {d) Sura II. 170 : ' There is no piety in turning 
your faces towards the East or the West, but he is pious who believeth 
in God . . . who for the love of God distributeth his wealth to 
his kindred, and to the orphans, and the need}^, and the wayfarer.' 



176 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

infants.^ /Nor was this all, for besides imposing re- 
strictions on polygamy, by his severe laws at first, and 
by the strong moral sentiment aroused by these laws 
afterwards, he has succeeded, down to this very day, 
and to a greater extent than has ever been the case 
•elsewhere, in freeing all Mohammedan countries from 
those professional outcasts who live by their own 
misery, and, by their existence as a recognised class, 
are a standing reproach to every member of the 
^society of which they form a part. 

Mohammed did not abolish slavery altogether, for 
in that condition of society it would have been 
neither possible nor desirable to do so ; but he en- 
couraged the emancipation of slaves ; he laid down 
the principle that every slave that embraced Islam 
should be ipso facto free, and, what is more im- 
portant, he took care that no stigma should attach to 
the emancipated slave in consequence of his honest 
and honourable life of labour. In Islam the emanci- 
pated slave is actually, as well as potentially, equal to 
a free-born citizen, and he often rises to one of the 
liighest posts in the Empire.^ As to those who con- 

^ Sura VI. 138, 141, 152. 

* Zeid, the freedman of the Prophet, often took the command in 
war. Captain Burton mentions ('Pilgrimage,' I. p. 89) that the 
pacha of the Syrian caravan with which he travelled to Damascus 
had been the slave of a slave. Sebuktegin, the father of the magnifi- 
cent Mahmoud, and founder of the Ghaznevide dynasty, was a 



TREATMENT OF SLAVES AND ORPHANS 177 

tinued slaves, he prescribed kindness and considera- 
tion in dealing with them.^ * See,' he said, in his 
parting address at Mina, the year before his death, 
*■ see that ye feed them with such food as ye eat 
yourselves, and clothe them with the stuff ye your- 
selves wear; for they are the servants of the Lord, and 
are not to be tormented.' The equality of all men 
before God was a principle which Mohammed every- 
where maintained ; and which taking, as it did, all 
caste feeling from slavery, took away also its chief 
sting. To Mohammed's mind labour could never be 
degrading, and the domestic slavery of the Arabs, 
under which, thanks to him, parents were never to be 
separated from their children, nor indeed relations 
from each other at all, though always to be con- 
demned in the abstract, became, under the Prophet's 
hands, a bond closer and more lasting, and hardly 
more liable to abuse, than domestic service else- 
where. 

The orphan, too, is the subject of his peculiar 
care, for he had been an orphan himself ; and what 
God had done for him, he was anxious, as far as 
might be, to do for others.^ The poor were always 

slave ; so was Kutb-ud-din, the conqueror and first king of Delhi, and 
the true founder, therefore, of the Mohammedan Empire in India, 
(See Elphinstone's ' India,' p. 320, and 363, and 370.) 

' Sura XXIV. 34, 57. 

* Sura VIII. 42, and XCIII. 6 to end. 

N 



178 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

present with him, and their condition never absent 
from his mind. In one of his early Suras, ' the 
steep,' as he calls it — that is to say, the straight and 
narrow way, is said to be to release the captive, to 
give food to the poor that lieth in the dust, and to stir 
up one another to stedfastness and compassion.^ And 
in another Sura, Jews and Arabs are alike warned in 
their exclusive pride in their common progenitor, 
Abraham, that verily the nearest of kin to Abraham 
are they who follow him in his works.^ 

Nor does Mohammed omit to lay stress on what I 
venture to think is as crucial a test of a moral code, 
and even of a religion, as is the treatment of the poor 
and the weak — I mean the duties we owe to what we 
call the lower animals. There is no religion which 
has taken a higher view in its authoritative documents 
of animal life, and none wherein the precept has 
been so much honoured by its practical observance. 
* There is no beast on earth,' says the Koran,^ ' nor 
bird which flieth with its wings, but the same is a 
people like unto you — unto the Lord shall they 
return ; ' and it is the current belief that animals will 
share with men the general resurrection, and be judged 
according to their works. At the slaughter of an 

* Sura XC. 12, 15, zxA passim. 

2 Sura III. 61. 

^ Sura VI. 38, and Sale's note ad loc. 



THE POOR AND ANIMALS 179 

animal, the Prophet ordered that the name of God 
should always be named, but the words * the Compas- 
sionate, the Merciful,' were to be omitted ; for on the 
one hand such an expression seemed a mockery to 
the sufferer, and, on the other, he could not bring 
himself to believe that the destruction of any life, 
however necessary, could be altogether pleasing to the 
All Merciful. ' In the name of God,' says a pious 
Mussulman, before he strikes the fatal blow, ' God is 
most Great ; God give thee patience to endure the 
affliction which He hath allotted thee ! ' ^ In the East 
there has been no moralist like Bentham to insist in 
noble words on the extension of the sphere of morality 
to all sentient beings, and to be ridiculed for it by 
people who call themselves religious ; there has been 
no naturalist like Danvin to demonstrate by his mar- 
vellous powers of observation how large a part of the 
mental and moral faculties which we usually claim 
for ourselves alone we share with other beings ; there 
has been no Oriental ' Society for the Prevention of 
Cruelty to Animals ; ' but one reason of this is not far 
to seek. What the legislation of the last few years has 
at length attempted to do, and from the mere fact that 
it is legislation, must do ineffectually, has been long 
effected in the East by the moral and religious senti- 
ment which, like almost everything that is good in that 

^ Lane's 'Modern Egyptians,' I., 119. 

N 2 



i8o MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

part of the world, can be traced back, in part at least, 
to the great Prophet of Arabia.^ In the East, so far 
as it has not been hardened by the West, there is a 
real sympathy between man and the domestic ani- 
mals ; they understand one another, and the cruelties 
which the most humane of our countrymen uncon- 
sciously inflict in the habitual use, for instance, of the 
muzzle or the bearing-rein on the most docile, the 
most patient, the most faithful, and the most intelli- 
gent of their companions, are impossible in the East. 
An Arab cannot ill-treat his horse ; and Lane bears 
emphatic testimony to the fact that in his long resi- 
dence in Egypt he never saw an ass or a dog (though 
the latter is there looked upon as an unclean animal) 
treated with cruelty, except in those cities which were 
overrun by Europeans.^ 

/ By absolutely prohibiting gambling and intoxicat- 
ing liquors, Mohammed did much to abolish, once and 

* The sympathy of the Prophet for his domestic animals is well 
kno-wnn. There is a great variety of traditions respecting his horses, 
his mules, his milch and riding camels, and his goats. It would be 
easy to write a complete biography of his favourite she-camel, Al 
Kaswa. Her eccentricities and perversities exercised an influence on 
some critical occasions in the Prophet's life — e.g. on his entrance to 
Medina, and at Kodeiba. Among the phenomena attending Mo- 
hammed's fits, it is recorded that if one came on him while riding, 
his camel itself became first wildly excited, and then fixed and rigid ! 
And I have little doubt that the story arose from the almost electric 
sympathy that exists between an intelligent animal that is kindly 
treated and its master. 

2 Lane, I., 359-361. 



HOW SHOULD CHRISTIANS REGARD ISLAM? i8i 

for all, over the vast regions that own his sway, two of 
the worst and most irremediable evils of European 
society ; evils to the intensity of which the Christian 
Governments of the nineteenth century are hardly yet 
beginning to awake. ^ Can anyone then deny what I 
have already hinted above, that, looking at him merely 
as a moral reformer, and apart from his great religious 
revolution, Mohammed was really doing Christ's work, 
even if he had reverenced Christ less than in fact 
he did ? / 

And this brings me to the most important question 
that I shall touch upon to-day ; and one, but for which, 
in its various bearings, I do not know that I should 
have written these Lectures \\\ mean the attitude that 
Christianity ought to bear to Mohammedanism now. 
To say that in spite of the theoretic intolerance of 
Mohammedanism, it ought, unless its theory is put into 
practice, itself to be tolerated, is happily now a mere 
truism. But it ought not to be treated with a merely 
contemptuous or distant recognition, or to be inserted 
tanquam infamm causa — 'Jews, Turks, Infidels, and 
Heretics' — in a collect, once a year, upon that day of 
all others upon which the universality of Christ's self- 
sacrifice is brought before us. When the draft of 
a treaty was brought to the General of the armies 
of revolutionary France, the first clause of which 

* Sura V. 92. 



1 82 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

/contained a formal recognition by the Emperor Francis 
of Austria — the representative of legitimacy, absolut- 
ism, and divine right — of the existence of the French 
Republic, ' Strike that clause out,' said Napoleon ; 
*■ the French Republic needs no recognition from him — 
it is as clear as the sun at noonday.' Mohammedanism 
needs no formal recognition of its existence by a 
faith with which it has so much in common. The 
immemorial quarrel between Mohammedanism and 
Christianity is, after all, a quarrel between near 
relations ; and, like most immemorial quarrels, is 
based chiefly on mutual misunderstandings. Without 
any appearance of extraordinary condescension, we 
should recognise the fact which Mohammedans 
themselves might at present certainly be inclined 
to deny, that Islam is the nearest approach to 
Christianity, I would almost call it, remembering 
Mohammed's intense reverence for Christ, the 
only form of Christianity, which has proved itself 
suited to the nations of the East. Even Dante 
placed Mohammed in the ' Inferno,' not as a heathen, 
but as a heretic; and is there any reason why our 
notion of Christianity should be less comprehensive 
than his 1 

Mohammedanism is the one religion in the world, 
besides our own and the Jewish, which is strictly and 
avowedly Monotheistic. ' Dispute not,' said Moham- 



THREE MONOTHEISTIC CREEDS 183 

med to his followers, *■ against those who have received 
the Scriptures, that is Jews and Christians, except 
with gentleness ; but say unto them we believe in the 
revelation which hath been sent down to us, and also in 
that which hath been sent down to you ; and our God 
and your God is one.' ^ And again he says in another 
place, * Verily the Believers, and those who are Jews, 
those who are Christians and Sabeans, whoever 
believeth in God, and the last day, and doeth that 
which \s> right, they shall have their reward with their 
L'ord, there shall come no fear upon them, neither 
shall they be grieved.' ^ The three Creeds are branches 
from the same parent stock, not different stocks ; and 
they all alike look back to the majestic character of 
Abraham as the first teacher of the unity of God. 
Mohammed says, again and again, that the belief he 
inculcates is no new belief — it is the original creed of 
El-Khalil Allah, the Friend of God. The heroes of 
the Old Testament history, Isaac and Jacob, Joseph 

» Sura V. 73. 

"^ Sura II. 59. There is a still more striking passage in V. 52-03 : 
' Unto every one have we given a law and a way. Now if God had 
pleased, He would surely have made you one people, but He hath made 
you to differ that He might try you in that which He hath given to each, 
therefore strive to excel each other in good works. Unto God shall ye all 
return, and He will tell you that concerning which ye have disagreed.' — 
Cf. Acts X. 35. These are passages on which the comparative mythologist, 
the Mussulman reformer, and the Christian missionaiy would alike do 
well to dwell. It is noteworthy also that the fifth Sura, from which two 
of them come, is placed by Rodwell and others last in the chronological 
order. 



1 84 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

and Joshua, David and Solomon, are heroes of the 
Mohammedan religion as well as of the Jewish and 
Christian. 

I remarked in my second Lecture that Mohammed 
may have thought himself justified in breaking the 
moral law he himself imposed, because a somewhat 
similar concession had been made to Moses. This is 
not a mere conjecture on my part, for it is certain that 
Mohammed had, for one who was so careless of facts, 
acquired somehow a full and fairly accurate knowledge 
of the history of the great Lawgiver. He relates it 
at length,^ and recurs to it with a passionate fondness 
from an early period in his career, evidently dwelling 
mentally on the striking parallels between himself and 
Moses, the shepherd life, the call to the Prophet's 
office, the rejection by their own countrymen, no less 
than — be it always remembered to Mohammed's 
credit that he does not disguise it — the main point of 
difference, the prodigality of miracles performed by 
the one, and the inability to work them in the other. 
One most sacred spot actually connects the two 
Prophets together. There is a tradition, to some ex- 
tent authenticated, that Mohammed drove the camels 
of Kadijah to the very place where Moses had tended 
the flocks of Jethro. Moses and Mohammed may 
have reposed on the same rock, watered their cattle 

> See especially Suras VII. XVIIL XXVII. XXVIII. LV. 



SPIRITUALITY OF ISLAM 185 

at the same springs, looked upon the same weird 
mountains.^ And it is a redeeming point, perhaps 
the only redeeming point, in the melancholy history 
of St, Catherine's Monastery, that from age to age 
within the convent walls, Mosque and Church have 
stood side by side, and Mussulmans and Christians 
have knelt together worshipping the same God ; and 
there, if only there in the world, venerating with a 
kindred, if not with an equal reverence, the same 
prophets, Moses and Mohammed, and One who is 
infinitely greater than them both.^ 
/ Again, Mohammedanism is essentially a spiritual 
religion. As instituted by Mohammed it had ' no 
priest and no sacrifice ;' ^ in other words, no caste of 
sacrificing priests were ever to be allowed to come 
between the human soul and God : forbidding the 
representation of all living things alike, whether as 
objects of use or of admiration, of veneration or of 

' Sura II. 57, VII. 160. 

' See the account of St, Catherine's and its degradation in ' The 
Desert of the Exodus,' by E. H. Palmer; and in Stanley's ' Sinai and 
Palestine,' p. 53-54. It is said that at Nijni Novgorod the same 
phenomenon, mosque and church as near and not unfriendly neigh- 
bours, may be observed ; but there no doubt it is commerce rather 
than religious sympathy which we have to thank for it. 

^ The Sacrifice at the Annual Pilgrimage is a mere relic of the 
Pagan practice ; it has little religious significance, and does not imply 
priestcraft ; it indicates only the belief that sin deserves death. In 
orthodox Mohammedanism there is no priestly caste, and therefore no 
fictions of apostolical succession, inherent sanctity, indissoluble vows, or 
powers of absolution. See Palgrave's ' Essays,' p. 82. 



i86 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

worship, Mohammedanism is more opposed to idolatry 
even than we are ourselves. ' Mohammed hated images 
more sternly even than the Iconoclasts of Constanti- 
nople or the soldiers of Cromwell. Every mosque in 
the world of Islam bears witness to this. Statuary 
and pictures being forbidden, variegated marbles, 
and festoons of lamps, and geometric shapes, and 
tortuous inscriptions from the Koran, have to supply 
their place as best they can, and form that peculiar spe- 
cies of ornamentation, strictly confined to the inanimate 
world, which we call Arabesque ; and which is still to be 
traced in the architecture of so many churches and so 
many mosques along the frontier line of four thousand 
miles which divides the realm of the Crescent from that 
of the Cross. ^ 

This hatred of idolatry has been found even 
among the most uncivilised followers of the Prophet. 
The gorgeous ritual, the gaudy pictures, and the pious 
frauds which play so large a part in the conversion of 
the Sclavonian nations to Christianity seem only to 
have alienated these semi-barbarians. Mahmoud, the 
Ghaznevide, the son of a slave and the conqueror of 

^ Cf. Stanley's ' Lectures on Eastern Church,' p. 273. Without 
discussing the general question at length, I may remark here that Gothic 
architecture, though it is not very ready to acknowledge the debt, 
owes much to Moorish architecture — in particular the Horse-shoe or 
Crescent Arch. The pointed arch itself is to be found in many early 
mosques, and some of the most famous Venetian buildings, St. Mark's 
among them, owe much to Saracenic architecture. 



REVERENCE FOR CHRIST 187 

Hindoostan, was offered a sum of ten millions sterling 
if only he would spare the famous idol in the pagoda 
of Somnat. Avarice is said to have been his beset- 
ting fault, but he replied in the memorable words, 
* Never shall Mahmoud be handed down to posterity 
as an idol seller, rather than an idol destroyer ; ' and 
broke it into pieces.^ 

Finally, Mohammedanism, in spite of centuries 
of wars and misunderstandings, looks back upon the 
Founder of our religion with reverence only less than 
that with which the most devout Christians regard Him. 
' So far from its being true, as is commonly sup- 
posed, that Mohammedans regard Christ as Chris- 
tians have too often regarded Mohammed, with 
hatred and with contempt ; Sir William Muir re- 
marks that devout Mussulmans never mention the 
name of Seyyedna Eesa, or Our Lord Jesus, 
without adding the words ' on whom be peace.' The 
highest honour that a Mussulman can conceive is 
given to Christ in the grave reserved for Him by the 
side of the Prophet himself in the great Mosque at 
Medina. Mohammedans expect that He will one day 
return to earth, and having slain Antichrist, will 
establish perfect peace among men. And Mr. Hunter^ 

* Ferishta's ' History of Mohammedan Power in India ' (Briggs's 
translation), I, p. 72 ; and Elphinstone's ' History of India,' p. 336. 
2 ' Our Indian Mussulmans,' p. 120, by W. W. Hunter. 



1 88 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

tells us that the Indian Sheeahs avowedly look 
forward to His reappearance simultaneously with that 
of the last of their twelve Imams, and to an amalga- 
mation of the two creeds ; of Islam as the followers of 
Ali hold it, and of Christianity, not as it is, but as they 
believe it was taught by Christ Himself^ 

If it be asked, why then did Mohammed not 
accept Christianity, I apprehend that the reasons are 
threefold ; and that it appears from the chronological 
order lately assigned to the Suras of the Koran, that 
at one period, that of the Fatrah, Mohammed did 
consider whether first Judaism, and secondly Chris- 
tianity, as he knew it, contained the message he had 
to give. 

) I. The first explanation I would suggest is, that 
the Christ known to him was the Christ, not of the 
Bible, but of tradition ; the Christ, not of the 
Canonical, but of the Apocryphal Gospels, and even 
these only from general tradition. The wonder is, 
Mohammed's information being confined to the in- 
coherent rhapsodies and the miraculous inanities of 
the Gospels of the Infancy, the Acta Pilati and the 
' Descensus ad Inferos,' not that he reverenced Christ 
so little, but so much. In the whole of the Koran 
there are only three passages which look like any direct 

^ For a curious discussion on the return of the Messiah to earth 
held at Timbuctoo, see Earth's ' Travels in Central Africa,' V., p. 4. 



WHV DID MOHAMMED REJECT CHRISTIANITY? 189 

acquaintance with the Evangelists ; and one of these, 
the well-known passage about the Paraclete, he 
misunderstands himself, and accuses Christians of 
intentionally perverting from its proper meaning, a 
prediction of the coming of the Periclyte, the Greek 
form of Mohammed, the Illustrious, or the Praised.^ 
'' 11. Secondly, the worship of saints and images, and 
the shape which certain floating ideas had taken when 
they were stereotyped in the formulas of the Christian 
Church, seemed to Mohammed to conflict with his fun- 
damental doctrine of the unity of God. The mysteries 
of the Trinity were to be appraised and handled by 
every one who called himself a Christian, not merely 
as a test, but as the test of his Christianity. Moham- 
med accuses even the Jews of having lost sight of 
their primary truth, which was also his, in calling 
Ezra the Son of God,^ and what wonder if he 
rejected a religion the essence of which he understood, 
and too many Christians of his time understood, 
to be, not a holy life, but, as it is still represented in 
the Athanasian Creed, an elaborate and unthinkable 
mode of thinking of the Trinity .'' ^ 

» Sura LXI. 6. 2 Sura IX. 30. 

* It is doubtful whether a people that has once become monotheis- 
tic in any other form than the Christian, can ever be brought to accept, 
I do not say Christianity altogether, but the doctrines that are often 
supposed to be of its very essence. Among such a people the missionary 
invariably finds that the doctrine of the Trinity, however explained, in- 
volves Tritheism, and their ears are at once closed to his teaching. To 



190 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Let US hear on these points Mohammed himself, 
remembering all the while how slight was his know- 
ledge of the doctrine which he travestied, and how 
dim the outline of the majestic character which yet 
filled his imagination : — 

' They surely are infidels who say God is the third 
of three, for there is no God but one God.' ^ 

* Say not three ; forbear, it will be better for thee ; 
God is only one God.'^ 

Christ was with Mohammed the greatest of 
Prophets.^ He had the power of working miracles ; 
He spoke in his cradle ; He made a bird out of clay.' 
(Incidents drawn from the Gospels of the Infancy or 
of St. Thomas.) He could give sight to the blind, 
and even raise the dead to life.^ He is the Word 
proceeding from God ; His name is the Messiah. 
Illustrious in this world and in the next, and one 
of those who have near access to God.^ * He is 
strengthened by the Holy Spirit,' for so Moham- 
med, in more than one passage, calls the Angel 
Gabriel.^ Mohammed all but believes in the Imma- 
culate Conception of the Virgin,^ and certainly in the 

a Pagan who accepts Christianity the change no doubt is one 
from Polytheism to Monotheism, but to the Jew or Mohammedan, 
except in very rare instances, it is the opposite. 

1 Sura V. 77. " Sura III. 41-43- 

2 Sura IV. 6. ' Sura III. 40. 

3 Sura II. 254. « Sura II. 81. 

' Sura III. 30. There was a well-known sect of Christians called 



MOHAMMED'S VIEWS OF THE TRINITY 191 

miraculous nature of the birth of Christ, to which he 
recurs repeatedly. ^ But that Jesus ever claimed, as 
is affirmed by the writers of the New Testament, and 
as we know He did, to be the Son of God, still less 
that He ever claimed to be equal with God, Moham- 
med could not bring himself to believe. 

* It becometh not a man that God should give him 
the Scriptures, and the Wisdom, and the spirit of 
Prophecy, and that then he should say to his followers. 
Be ye worshippers of me as well as of God, but rather 
Be ye perfect in things pertaining to God, since ye 
know the Scriptures, and have studied them.' ^ 

And again, * For the Messiah himself said. Oh 
children of Israel, worship God, my Lord and 
yours.' ^ 

And once more, * Those who say that Jesus, the 
Son of Mary, is the Son of God, are infidels, for who 
could stop the arm of God if He were to destroy the 
Messiah and His mother, and all who are in the earth 
together } ' ^ 

Neither can Mohammed ever believe that Jesus 
could have been crucified. ' It is so long ago, let us hope 
that it is not true,' said an old Cumberland woman 

Collyridians in Arabia who paid the Virgin divine honours, and offered 
her a twisted cake {KoKKvpis). Thence, no doubt, came Mohammed's 
idea that the Virgin was one of the Persons of the Trinity. 

1 Sura XIX. 20. ^ gura V. 76. 

2 Sura III. 73. 4 Sura V. 19. 



192 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

when she heard for the first time in her Hfe the story 
of the Crucifixion. ' If I and my brave Franks had 
been there, we would have avenged His injuries,' 
was the exclamation of the fierce barbarian Clovis 
when he received his first lesson in the Christian life. 
The Dreamer of the Desert sympathised rather with 
the first of these. As Stesichorus^ believed that 
the Greeks and Trojans fought for the phantom of 
Helen, and not for Helen herself; as the Docetists 
held that the phantom of Jesus and not Jesus had 
been crucified ; so Mohammed rebels at the thought 
that God can ever have allowed such a tragedy to 
take place. Some one else, he curiously supposes, 
who deserved such a death — perhaps it was Judas 
himself — may have been substituted for Christ ; and 
Christ being taken up to heaven, must have felt 
that the deception thus practised on the Jews was a 
kind of punishment to himself for not having taken 
greater pains to prevent men calling him the Son of 
God."-^ And at the resurrection Jesus will Himself 
testify against both Jews and Christians ; the Jews for 
not having received Him as a prophet, the Christians 
for having received Him as God. 

There is a short chapter in the Koran which Mus- 
sulmans look upon as equal to a third of the whole in 
value : 

1 Plato, 'Republic,' IX. 386. 2 Sura III. 49, IV. 156. 



MOHAMMED'S VIEWS OF CHRIST 193 

' Say there is one God alone — 

God the Eternal ; 
He begetteth not, and He is not begotten, 
And there is none like unto Him.' ^ 

And once more, * They say the Merciful hath 
gotten offspring. Now have ye done a monstrous 
thing; almost might the very heavens rend thereat, 
and the earth rend asunder, and the mountains fall 
down in fragments, that they ascribe a son to the 
Merciful, when it becometh not the Merciful to beget 
a son. Verily there is nobody in the heavens nor 
in the earth that shall approach the Merciful but 
as a servant.' ^ 

I have dwelt thus at length upon Mohammed's 
views of Christ, partly because of the intrinsic in- 
terest and importance attaching to the views held by 
one so great of one so infinitely greater ; partly 
because they show how little Mohammed, and in- 
deed how little Christians themselves, understood 
the real nature of Christianity ; partly also because 
the strictures of Mohammed, however exaggerated 
and however mistaken, seem to me to suggest a 
caution necessary for us all. Christ came to reveal 
God, not to hide Him ; to bring Him down to earth, 
not to shroud Him in an immeasurable distance ; to 
tell us that God is not primarily Justice, or Truth, 

» Sura CXII. 2 Sura XIX. 91-94. 

O 



194 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

or Power, but Love. Do Christians always remem- 
ber this ? Are our views of Justification, of Origi- 
nal Sin, of a Future Life, when drawn out in the 
forensic and almost legal language in which some 
Churches foolishly delight to clothe them, always 
consistent with it ? Do our prayers always pre- 
suppose a God who, in His own intrinsic nature, is 
anxious to receive them ? Are we not apt to forget 
the unity of God, while we dogmatise on the Trinity ? 
Do we not sometimes place Christ as it were in front 
of God, thinking so much of the Son who sacrificed 
Himself, that we ignore the Father who ' spared Him 
not ; ' forgetting the Giver in the very magnitude of 
the gift ? 

IIL And the third reason, and perhaps the 
most important of all, for Mohammed's rejection of 
Christianity is the fact that Christianity as. he knew 
it had been tried and had failed. It had been known 
for three hundred years in Arabia, and had not been 
able to overthrow, or even weaken, the idolatry of 
the inhabitants. 

It is strange, with this fact and the whole course 
of history before him, with which evidently few are 
more familiar, that a great writer can conclude a 
review of Mohammedanism, which is otherwise fair 
and able, by endorsing the charge made against it, 
that it has kept back the East by hindering the spread 



IS ISLAM ANTI-CHRISTIAN? 195 

of Christianity. The charge has been often made 
before, ^ but it rests on so slender a basis that I should 
not have thought it necessary to disouss it here, had 
I not found at the last moment that one who is 
apparently so high an authority has lent the weight 
of his name to it. That I may do him no injustice, I 
quote his own words : — 

' Mohammed in his own age and country was the 
greatest of reformers — a reformer alike religious, 

moral, and political But when his 

system passed the borders of the land in which it was 
so great a reform, it became the greatest of curses to 
mankind. The main cause which has made the reli- 
gion of Mohammed exercise so blighting an influence 
on every land where it has been preached, is because 
it is an imperfect system standing in the way of one 
more perfect. Islam has in it just enough of good to 

hinder the reception of greater good. . ■ 

Because Islam comes nearer to Christianity than any 
other false system, because it comes nearer than any 
other to satisfying the wants of man's spiritual nature, 
for that very reason it is, above all other false systems, 
pre-eminently anti-Christian. It is, as it were, the 
personal enemy and rival of the Faith, disputing on 
equal terms for the same prize ! ' ^ 

^ As, for instance, by Sir W. Muir, IV. 321. 

2 British Quartej-ly Review, Jan. 1872, p. 132-134. 

o 2 



196 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

This indictment is so well drawn, at first sight it 
so carries conviction with it, and yet, if true, it is so 
fatal to any favourable or any fair judgment of 
Mohammedanism, that I am compelled, while I gladly 
acknowledge the author's fair and sympathetic treat- 
ment of the subject in every page that precedes and 
follows those I have quoted, to contest, from my 
point of view, as strongly as I can, upon this question, 
alike his facts and his inferences. 

Upon what single fact then, either before or after 
Mohammed's time, does the writer ground this charge? 
If the purest Christianity of all, preached by Christ 
and His Apostles, did not make way in the Eastern 
world ; if the few Christian Churches which did exist 
among the half Roman or Hellenic inhabitants of 
Syria and of Africa had sunk to the condition in which 
we know they were when Mohammedanism swept 
them away, what reason have we, either a priori or a 
posteriori, for supposing that the Christianity of any 
later time would have been more successful ? Have 
Christian nations been so energetic or so successful in 
converting any of those African or Asiatic nations 
which Mohammedanism has never reached, as to en- 
title us to turn round upon the religion which has re- 
moulded so large a portion of the human race, and tell 
it that it is a curse to humanity because, forsooth, while 
we admit it was in its time a grand forward movement 



SPIRIT OF CHRIST 197 

and has been a higher hfe to untold millions since, we 
wish that Fetish worship should have lasted on perhaps 
till now, that Christianity may now have the chance of 
doing the work somewhat better ? If this is Chris- 
tianity, I only say most certainly it is not of Christ. 
It is not of the spirit of Him who said that those who 
were not against Him were with Him ; and rejoiced 
that good was done by others, even if it seemed an 
infringement of His own Divine commission. Christ 
was not like the Praetorian prefect of Tacitus, ' Consiliiy 
qiiavivis egregii, quod non ipse ajferret iiiiuiiais,' 
though some Christians would have it that He was. 
The only monopoly of good that Christianity, if it is 
of the spirit of its Founder, may claim, is the monopoly 
not of doing good, but of rejoicing at it whenever it 
is done, and whoever does it ; of showing, if it carries 
out its Founder's intentions, that it is wide enough to 
recognise as its own and to embrace within its ample 
bosom all honest ' seekers after God,' and all true 
benefactors of humanity. The most * anti-Christian ' 
religion is not that which comes nearest to Christianity, 
but that which is furthest removed from it ; and the 
religion which after Christianity comes nearest to 
* satisfying the wants of man's spiritual nature ' is 
really not its most deadly enemy, but its best ally. 
To say othenvise, liberal and tolerant as the author 
unquestionably is, is to encourage weaker men under 



198 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

the shadow of his name,^ not merely to indulge in the 
odiiun theologicum ; but to assert that the odium theo- 
logicum itself is Christian. 

' Non tali auxilio nee defensoribus istis 
Tempus eget.' 

Can it be forgotten that the churches planted by 
the great Apostle were, without exception, to the west 
of Palestine — that star-worship and fire-worship were 
unaffected by Christianity then, even as Brahminism 
and Buddhism are unaffected by it now ? Can we 
point to a single Oriental nation which has been able 
to accept and to retain Christianity in its pure form, 
or to a single religion to be named with Mohammed- 
anism in point of purity and sublimity, which has ever 
been able to overthrow any national Oriental faith? 
And, if we cannot, what right have we to say that it is 
Islam, and not Nature, that has hitherto stood in the 
way of Christianity in Arabia and Persia, in Africa and 
India ? The triumphs of the Cross have indeed been 
far purer, far wider, far sublimer than those of the 
Crescent ; but they have been hitherto confined to 
the higher races of the world. Uncivilised nations of 

^ This has aetually been the case, for the passage I have quoted 
was the only one in an othei'wi-se most temperate essay upon which 
religious periodicals pounced, and, by quoting apart from its context, 
fanned the flame of misconception and prejudice which, even when 
read with everything which tends the other way, it would, in my judg- 
ment, be likely to kindle. 



CHRISTIANITY THE RELIGION OF THE WEST 199 

the higher stock, Ostrogoths and Visigoths, Vandals 
and Lombards, Franks and Northmen, the Celt, the 
Teuton, and the Sclavonian, invaded Christianity only 
to be conquered by it. But upon the Oriental bar- 
barians of a lower race who invaded Europe, with 
the one exception of the Magyars, whose case is 
special,^ Huns and Avars, Turks and Tartars, it has 
had no influence. Shall Christians, then, complain 
of Mohammedans for having succeeded in sqme 
measure in doing for the East what they have failed 
to do ; or would Christ have rejected what good 
service Mohammed did because his credentials were 
not precisely those of the Apostles t What super- 
ficial appearance of truth there is in the charge is this 
— that no Mohammedan nation has hitherto accepted 
Christianity, while some nations that were nominally 



' The Magyars, whatever their original home — and it seems that 
they were of the Finnish stock — are probably the most mixed race on the 
Continent of Em-ope, and were so even before they settled within the 
limits of the present Hungary. In their march towards Europe they 
were joined by hosts of Chazars, Bulgarians, and Sclavonians. During 
their ravages, which lasted for some fifty years, and spread from the 
Oural Mountains to the Pyrenees, they transported women and 
children wholesale from the countries they oveiTan to their head- 
qiiarters on the Danube ; and it is probable that at the time of 
their avowed conversion by Adalbert, about a.d. iooo, they had at 
least as much Genr.an and Italian as they had Tartar blood in their 
veins. St. Piligiinus (quoted by Gibbon, VII. 172), the first mis- 
sionaiy who entered Hungary, says that he found the ' majority of the 
population to be Christians,' qui ex omiii parte viundi illuc tracti sunt 
captivi. 



20O MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Christians have accepted Mohammedanism. But to 
establish the charge it would, of course, be necessary 
to show that the East, if it had not accepted Moham- 
medanism, would have accepted a real Christianity, 
or any religion so much like Christianity as Moham- 
medanism unquestionably is ; and to do this we must 
read history backwards. 

^ Now Mohammed offered to the Arabs an idea of 
God less sympathetic and less loveable, indeed, but as 
sublime as the Christian, and perhaps still more 
intense, and one, as it turned out, which they could 
receive. Christianity was compelled to leave its birth- 
place — the inhabitants and subsequent history of which 
it has scarcely affected, except indirectly — to find its 
proper home in the Western world, among the inhabit- 
ants and progressive civilisation of Greece and Rome. 
The lot of Mohammedanism has been different ; ' it is 
the religion of the shepherd and the nomad, of the burn- 
ing desert and the boundless steppe.' So admirably 
suited was it to the region in Avhich it was born, that 
it needed no foreign air or change of circumstances to 
develope it.^ ' 

In its simple grandeur it has been able, without 
tampering with that which is its Alpha and Omega — 
the belief in one God, who reveals Himself by His 

* Compare throughout this paragraph, M. Earth. St, Hilaire, 
p. 230 seq. 



ISLAM THE RELIGION OF PASTORAL RACES 201 

prophets — to leave the most essential elements of 
national life to the various nations which made up the 
Arabian empire ; and to adapt itself to every peculi- 
arity, mental and moral, of the inhabitants of Central 
and Western Asia. The rapid intuition and the wild 
flights of imagination ; the vivid mental play around 
the Antinomies of the reason, and the craving for 
the supernatural in the utmost particularity of detail ; 
the fervid asceticism of the Dervish, and the mystic 
Pantheism of the Soufy, have each found in Islam 
something to meet their wants. 

But, on the other hand, Mohammedanism has 
never passed into countries of a wholly different 
nature, and held them permanently. Spain is not a 
case in point, though it was never so well governed as 
under the Mohammedans ; for the Spaniards them- 
selves never became Mohammedan, and the Moorish 
settlement there was only like a Greek sTTLTsl'y^LaiLia or a 
Roman colonia — an outpost in the heart of the 
enemy's country. Much the same may be said of 
Turkey, where the subject population has always re- 
mained Christian. I cannot, therefore, '_^ace tanti 
nommis,' follow Gibbon in his picture of the probable 
consequences to European civilisation had Charles 
Martel been conquered at Tours ; of Mussulman 
preachers demonstrating to a circumcised audience, in 
the mosques of Paris and of Oxford, the truth of the 



202 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

religion of Mohammed ! The wave of conquest might 
have spread over Europe ; but it would have been 
but a wave, and few traces would have been left when 
it had swept on. In Africa the case was different ; 
the Greek colonists and Roman conquerors — the 
higher races, in fact — were driven out by the Sara- 
cens, and, ' in their climate and habits, the wandering 
Moors who remained behind already resembled the 
Bedouins of the desert.' ^ Mohammedanism is the 
only form in which the knowledge of the true God has 
ever made way with the native races of Africa ; and 
the form of Christianity which it supplanted in the 
North — the Christianity of the Donatists and of the 
Nitrian monks ; of Cyril, strangely called a saint ; and 
of the infamous George of Cappadocia, still more 
strangely transformed into St. George of England, the 
patron of chivalry and of the Garter — was infinitely 
inferior to Mohammedanism itself. 

I fully admit that Mohammedanism, if indeed it 
had succeeded in conquering the most civilised races 
•of the world and the Christianity of the West, 
as it succeeded in conquering the Eastern nations 
and their various forms of belief, would have con- 
quered something that was potentially better than 
itself, and then it would have been what Christian 
waiters are so fond of calling it — a curse to the world 

J Gibbon, VI. LI. p. 473. 



ISLAM IN AFRICA AND SPAIN 203 

rather than a blessing. It would have stepped beyond 
what I conceive to have been its proper mission ; but I 
maintain that it stopped short of this, and that it de- 
stroyed nothing that was not far inferior to itself I 
should hesitate to say that even its conquest of Spain 
was not, while it lasted, a blessing to Spain itself, and 
through Spain to the whole of Europe. Has Spain 
exhibited more order, more toleration, more industry, 
better faith, more material prosperity, under her most 
Christian Kings, or under her Ommiade Kaliphs ? 
The names of the three Abdal Rahmans, and of 
Almamun, suggest all that is most glorious in Spanish 
history, and much that has conferred benefit on the 
rest of Europe in the darkest period of her annals — 
religious zeal without religious intolerance, philosophy 
and literature, science and art, hospitals, and libraries, 
and universities. 

It follows, from what I have said, that Moham- 
medanism is not a world-wide religion. The sphere 
of its influence is vast, but not boundless ; in catholi- 
city of application it is as much below the purest 
Christianity as the Semitic and Turanian nations 
Avhich have embraced it are below the Western 
Indo-Germanic. I say the Western Indo-Germanic 
races, for among the Eastern branches of that great 
family, the inhabitants of Persia and of Hindoostan, 
Mohammedanism did establish itself 



204 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

The Persians are of a race and genius widely diffe- 
rent from the Arabs ; but the surroundings and the 
general mode of life are the same in each, and the ex- 
ception, so far as it is an exception, to the rule I have 
laid down, tends rather, in its results, to prove its 
general truth, for the hold of Mohammedanism on 
them has been much modified by the difference of 
race. The religion which proclaimed the absolute 
supremacy of God was no doubt an infinite advance 
upon the ' chilling equipoise ' of good and evil to which 
the creed of Zoroaster had at that time sunk. ^ Nor 
was the national existence of Persia stamped out, as 
has been often said, by the Kaliphs ; for the Persian 
province of Khorasan was itself strong enough to 
place the Abbasside Kaliphs on the throne of Bag- 
dad ; and the Persian dynasties of the Samanides and 
Dilemites gave to the nation a new lease of life, and a 
wholly new national literature ; and it is to a Moham- 
medan Sultan of the Turkish race that Persia owes 
her greatest literary glory, her national epic, the 
* Shahnameh' of Ferdousi. Still it cannot be said that 
the religion proved itself altogether suited to the 
people. In other countries the scymitar had no sooner 
been drawn from its scabbard than it was sheathed 
again. But in Persia the scymitar had not only to 
clear the way, but for some time afterwards to main- 

^ See Elphinstone's 'India,' V. I. 313. 



ISLAM IN PERSIA AND INDIA 205 

tain the new religion.^ The Persians corrupted its 
simpHcity with fables and with miracles ; they actually 
imported into it something of saint-worship, and some- 
thing of sacerdotalism; and, consequently, in no nation 
in the Mohammedan world has the religion less hold on 
the people as a restraining power. The most stringent 
principles of the Koran are set at nought ; beng and 
opium are common ; the Ketman, or religious equivo- 
cation, is held to be as allowable as it has been by 
the Casuists or the Jesuits ; and the nation which 
Herodotus tells us devoted a third of its whole 
educational curriculum to learning to speak the 
truth, now contains hardly an individual who will 
speak the truth unless he has something to gain 
by it. 

In Hindoostan, amidst the other branch of the great 
Aryan race which did not move westward, Mohammed- 
anism has obtained finally a very strong footing ; but it 
w^as slow in winning its way ; and the thirty million 
Mussulmans over whom we rule — and a tremendous 
and but half-recognised responsibility it is ^ — devout as 
they are, have become so by long lapse of time, by social 
influences, and by intermixture with conquering Arabs, 

' See Sir John jNIalcolnvs ' History of Persia,' I. VIII. p. 277, &c. 

2 Since this was written the grievances of Mohammedans in India, 
so ably and temperately stated by Mr. Hunter, have been in part 
alleviated by the adoption of some of the remedies he suggests, at leas 
as far as regards education. 



2o6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Ghaznevides, and Affghans, rather than by the sudden 
fervour of reHgious enthusiasm.^ 

Those who have followed me thus far will perceive 
that my main object in writing these Lectures has 
been, if possible, to render some measure of that jus- 
tice to Mohammed and to his religion which has been 
all too long, and is still all too generally, denied to 
them. I have naturally, therefore, been led to dwell 
rather on the points in which Mohammedanism 
resembles Christianity than on the points in which it 
differs, and I have been led, also, to some extent, to 
compare the persons of their respective Founders. It 
is not possible to avoid this. Of the Founder of 
Christianity I have necessarily spoken only under 
that aspect of His character which Mussulman as well 
as Christian, friend as well as foe, will perforce allow 
Him ; and in which alone, by the nature of the case. 
He can be compared with any other Founder at all. 
In like manner, in comparing the two creeds, I have 
insisted mainly on the points in which they approxi- 
mate to each other ; and to do this is more necessary, 
more just, and, I venture to think, more Christian, than 
to do the opposite. 

But if, in order to prevent misconception, the two 
creeds must necessarily be contrasted rather than 

^ Elphinstone, V. I, 314, and Cap. III. on the Reign of the Sultan 
Mahmoud. 



CONTRAST BETWEEN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY 207 

compared, nothing that I have said, or am going to 
say, will prevent my admitting fully — what, indeed, is 
apparent upon the face of it — that the contrasts are 
at least as striking as the resemblances. 

^ The religion of Christ contains whole fields of 
morality and whole realms of thought which are all but 
outside the religion of Mohammed. It opens hiimi- 
lity, purity of heart, forgiveness of injuries, sacrifice 
of self to man's moral nature ; it gives scope for 
toleration, development, boundless progress to his 
mind ; its motive power is stronger, even as a friend 
is better than a king, and love higher than obedience. 
Its realised ideals in the various paths of human 
greatness have been more commanding, more many- 
sided, more holy, as Averroes is below Newton, 
Haroun below Alfred, and Ali below St. Paul. 
Finally, the ideal life of all is far more elevating, 
far more majestic, far more inspiring, even as the 
life of the founder of Mohammedanism is below the 
life of the Founder of Christianity. ' 

And when I speak of the ideal life of Moham- 
medanism I must not be misunderstood. There is in 
Mohammedanism no ideal life in the true sense of 
the word, for Mohammed's character was admitted 
by himself to be a weak and erring one. It was 
disfigured by at least one huge moral blemish ; 
and exactly in so far as his life has, in spite of 



2o8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

his earnest and reiterated protestations, been made 
•an example to be followed, has that vice been 
perpetuated. But in Christianity the case is different. 
The words, '■ Which of you convinceth me of sin } ' 
forced from the mouth of Him who was meek and 
lowly of heart, by the wickedness of those who, 
priding themselves on being Abraham's children, 
never did the works of Abraham, are a definite chal- 
lenge to the world. That challenge has been for 
nineteen centuries before the eyes of unfriendly, as well 
as of believing, readers, and it has never yet been fairly 
met ; and at this moment, by the confession of friend 
and foe alike, the character of Jesus of Nazareth 
stands alone in its spotless purity and its unapproach- 
able majesty. We have each of us probably at some 
period of our lives tried hard to penetrate to the 
inmost meaning of some one of Christ's short and 
■weighty utterances — 

' Those jewels, five words long, 
Which on the stretched forefinger of all time 
Sparkle for ever. ' 

But is there one of us who can say there is no more 
iDehind t Is there one thoughtful person among 
us who has ever studied the character of Christ, and 
has not, in spite of ever-recurring difficulties and 
doubts, once and again, burst into the centurion's ex- 
clamation, ' Truly this was the Son of God ' ? 



CONTRAST BETWEEN MOHAMMED AND CHRIST 209 

Nor are the methods of drawing near to God the 
same in the two reHgions. The Mussulman gains a 
knowledge of God — he can hardly be said to approach 
Him — by listening to the lofty message of God's 
Prophet. The Christian believes that he approaches 
God by a process which, however difficult it may 
be to define, yet has had a real meaning to 
Christ's servants, and has embodied itself in countless 
types of Christian character — that mysterious some- 
thing which St. Paul calls a ' union with Christ' 
* Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in 
God.' 

But this unmistakeable superiority does not shake 
my position that Mohammedanism is, after all, an 
approach to Christianity, and perhaps the nearest 
approach to it which the unprogressive part of huma- 
nity can ever attain in masses ; and yet how large 
a part of the whole human race are unprogressive ! 
Whatever we may wish, and however current con- 
versation and literature may assert the contrary, 
progress is the exception, and not the rule, with man- 
kind. The whole Eastern world, with very few ex- 
ceptions, has been hitherto, and is still, stationary, not 
progressive. What Oriental society is now, it was 
in the time of Solomon — I might say, in the time 
of Abraham. Even those nations which, like the 
Chinese, have considerable powers of invention and 

P 



2IO MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

mechanical skill, reach a certain height rapidly, and 
then stop short.^ 

Accepting, then, the non-progressiveness of a large 
part of the human race, when left to themselves, 
as a fact, cannot we estimate other religions, not by 
our conception of what we want, but by their bearing 
on the life of those whom they affect, ennobling them 
so far as the other conditions of their existence may 
render possible ? Judged by this relative standard — 
which is, as I conceive, the only true one — Moham- 
medanism has nothing to lose, and everything to 
gain, by the keenest criticism.^ I grant to the full 



^ I specify China ; for I cannot accept the changes relied upon by 
Dr. Bridges, in his very able essay on China, in ' International 
Policy,' as being evidence of continuous and progressive change, which 
is the i-eal point at issue. Of course this in no way affects the more 
important questions treated of in the essay, the moral elevation of which 
seems to me almost unequalled in the writings even of those Vho, like the 
contributors to the volume referred to, and the followers 'of Auguste 
Comte generally, have laboured most earnestly to treat all political 
questions from a moral standpoint. 

^ Abyssinia is a case in point for those who think that a religion, 
because it is better and purer in itself, is necessarily better than all 
other religions, wherever and whenever and in whatever degi^ee of 
purity it may be found. Abyssinia has been nominally Christian since 
very early times, and yet it would puzzle the greatest enemy of Islam 
to name a single particular in which the inhabitants are superior to their 
Mussulman neighbours. Spain may suggest similar thoughts. We 
are apt to forget that there are two factors to be considered in testing 
the value, of a religion in any given case, the Creed itself and the 
people who receive it. There are of course good and bad men, and 
these of every degree of goodness and badness, to be found professing 
every Creed, but the average morality of the followers of an imperfect 



RELATIVE STANDARD THE ONLY TRUE ONE 21 r 

everything that can be said by travellers such as Burck- 
hardt, and Burton, and Palgrave upon the degrada- 
tion of the mass of the Bedouins and the Turks, and 
the want of all vital religion, sometimes of the very 
elements of religion, among them. But is the state 
of the Mohammedan world as a whole worse in pro- 
portion to its light than was that of Christendom 
when the cup of iniquity was full and a Luther was 
born ? To take a particular instance, has religion less 
hold upon the Arabs than it had upon the English 
throughout the last century, till the evangelical revival 
of Wesley and Whitefield roused it from its sleep ? 
Has it less hold even upon the ' Frenchmen of 
the East,' as the Persians have been called — liars, 
drunkards, profligate though they are — than it has 
at this moment upon the Frenchmen of the West ? 
What account do travellers in Russia give us of the 
state of religion among the masses there ? And what 
judgment must pious Mohammedans form of Chris- 
tianity, if their knowledge of it is confined to the 
average lives of Europeans who profess it ? 

To say that gross abuses have crept into Moham- 
medanism — that the lives of many, or even of the 
majority, who profess it are a disgrace to their name — 

Creed may, in this very imperfect world, be better than the average 
morality of those who profess a higher one, and of course vice versa. 
irdvTOiiv fjiirpov avQoonvos. 

P 2 



212 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

is only to say that it is not exempt from the common 

conditions of humanity. . 

Take one instance, drawn from the history of the 

Christian Church. Christianity was in its origin and 
in its essence a creed entirely spiritual ; but Christians, 
forming, as they did, a new human society, were 
allowed by their Founder to symbolise this close 
union, and to bring it home more vividly to them- 
selves and to the world, by two external rites. The 
mere fact that they were external, in a religion which 
was otherwise a matter of the heart, ought to have 
put men on their guard, lest they should assume in 
time a too prominent place ; lest what was accidental, 
and secondary, and relative should dominate over 
what was absolute, and primary, and eternal. Baptism 
was of considerable importance in the infancy of the 
Church, for it was a pledge of fidelity consciously and 
voluntarily given by a new recruit, in the face of the 
enemy, to a cause whose victories were yet in the 
future. It was, as it were, the uniform assumed by 
the small army which at its Master's bidding went 
forth against the world. The love-feast also was of 
special importance among the earliest Christians, as 
a constant reminder that those who had taken upon 
themselves the commission of the Cross, that crown- 
ing act of love, were bound to one another by the 
same enthusiasm of love which bound them to their 



ALL RELIGIONS LIABLE TO CORRUPTIONS 21 



O" 



common Master. Both did good service then, and in 
the history of the Christian Church have done good 
service since, in so far as they have acted upon the 
heart, and thence upon the conduct, through the 
medium of a very powerful appeal to the religious 
imagination. But in so far as any mysterious or 
supernatural efficacy has been attached to the form 
of either, they have sapped the root of Christianity, 
They have done for Christianity what of good, no 
doubt, Mohammed thought, and, half rightly, half 
wrongly, thought, that pilgrimages to the holy places 
might do for Mohammedanism. Both were so far 
concessions to human weakness that they introduced 
formal, or even material, conceptions into a spiritual 
religion ; both, in fact, were capable of being used to 
advantage ; and experience has proved that they were 
both alike liable to the same kind of abuse. 

Every human institution, therefore — religion itself, 
so far as man can affect it — is exposed to inevitable 
decay ; and the purer the religion, the more inevitable 
the degradation which contact with the world, which is 
not of it, must bring.^ Accordingly, a religion which 
is not waiting for a revival is waiting only till it be 
swept away. 

But, on the other hand, we must not judge of a 
religion by its perversions or corruptions ; and it is as 

* Max Miiller, ' Chips,' Preface, p. 23. 



214 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

fair to take Turkish despots, and maniac dervishes, 
and Persian libertines as types of the Mohammedan 
life, as It would be to take Anabaptists, or Pillar Saints, 
or Jesuits, as types of the Christian life. Most of the 
well-known vices of our Mohammedan fellow-subjects 
in India are Indian vices, and not Mohammedan. 
Max Miiller has remarked with truth, that without 
constant reformation — that is to say, without a constant 
return to the fountain head — every religion, however 
pure, must gradually degenerate. / Christianity has 
always reformed itself, and will to the end of time 
continue to reform itself, by going back to the words 
and to the life of Christ. It is a maxim of the 
Buddhists that ^ what has been said by Buddha, that 
alone Is well said ;' ^ and it is currently believed that 
Mohammedanism Is dying out because it has no such 
power of revival. But the very reverse of this is, rather, 
true. Probably no religion has produced. In the various 
parts of Its vast empire, a more continuous succession 
of reformers, whose aim has been to bring it back to 
its original simplicity and purity. Such was one object, 
however wildly they set about it, of the Carmathlans 
in the ninth century ; and, to select one amongst many 
individual reformers, such was the career of Abdul 
Wahhab, the son of a petty Arabian sheik, a hundred 
and fifty years ago. The facts I take almost verbatim 

* Quoted by Max Mliller, loc. cit. p. 23. 



ISLAM HAS THE POWER OF REVIVAL 215 

from an interesting and able essay on * Our Indian 
Mussulmans,' by Dr. Hunter.^ 

Commencing by a moral attack upon the profli- 
gacy of the Turkish pilgrims and the mummeries which 
profaned the holy cities, Abdul Wahhab gradually 
elaborated a theological system which is substantially 
identical with the original creed of Mohammed. He 
taught, first, absolute reliance on one God, and the 
rejection of all mediators between man and God, 
whether saints or Mohammed himself ; second, the 
right of private interpretation of the Koran ; third, 
the prohibition of all .forms and ceremonies with which 
the pure faith has been overlaid in the lapse of cen- 
turies ; finally — and this is the only part to be regretted 
in the movement — he reasserted the obligation to wage 
war upon the infidel. In 1803 Wahhab's successors 
took the holy cities, and desecrated the sacred 
mosque at Mecca and the Prophet's tomb at Medina, 
to save them from the greater desecration, as it 
seemed to those Puritans of the Desert, involved in 
the almost Divine honours lavished on them by igno- 
rant or profligate pilgrims. 

Here was an act upon the significance of which 
we may well dwell for a moment, and endeavour, by 
comparing it with somewhat parallel and better- 

^ See Hunter, p. 55-60; and for a further account of the Arab move- 
ment, see Burckhardt's ' Notes on the Bedouins and Wahhabees.' 



2i6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

known cases, to realise what it must have seemed Hke 
then, and what it proves about Mohammedanism 
now. Imagine the feehngs of pious Jews when their 
most rehgious king broke into pieces the reHc of 
reHcs, the memorial of the Divine deliverance and of 
their desert life, and stigmatised it as a bit of brass ! 
Imagine, if you can, the feelings of the Apostles when 
it dawned upon them that one of their number, even 
then, was a traitor in his heart ! Imagine, to take a 
parallel case suggested by Mr. Hunter,^ mediaeval 
Christendom, when the news spread that Bourbon's 
cut-throats were installed in the Vatican, and that the 
head of the Christian Church had been taken captive 
by the Church's eldest son ! Imagine Luther, when 
in the fervour of youthful enthusiasm he visited the 
Rome of the Martyrs and of the Apostles, and found 
it to be the Rome of the Papacy, the Rome of 
impostures and indulgences, of the Borgias and the 
Medici ! And we can then picture to ourselves the 
thrill of horror that must have passed through the 
orthodox Mussulman world when they heard that a 
sect of reformers, whose one idea of reform was a re- 
turn to the life and doctrine of the Prophet, had rifled 
the mosque whose immemorial sanctity the Prophet 
had himself increased by making it the Kiblah of the 
world, and had even violated the Prophet's tomb. 

1 Hunter, p. 59. 



THE WAHHABEES 217 

Imagine, on the other hand, what it must have cost 
the Wahhabees to have, Hke Luther, the courage of 
their convictions, to appear to stultify themselves, to 
dishonour their Prophet, and all that they might make 
their religion the spiritual religion that it had once 
been ! And then say, if you can, that jMohammedan- 
ism has no power of self-reform, and is dying gra- 
dually of inanition ! 

Beaten down at last by the strong arm of Mehemet 
Ali, Pasha of Egypt in 18 12, helped, I regret to say, by 
Englishmen, the Wahhabees disappeared temporarily 
from Arabia,^ only to reappear in 1821 in India, under 
the leadership of the prophet Sayyed Ahmad; and the 
despised sect of Wahhabees are now, perhaps, the real 
ruling spirit of Mussulman politics in India, and 
enjoy the singular honour of having as much, no 
doubt, by their gloomy fanaticism as by their moral 
lives and their missionary zeal, attracted to themselves 
considerable attention even from their English rulers 
at home. Puritans of the Puritans of Islam, they are 
despised and hated by the so-called orthodox Mus- 
sulmans, as the Lutherans were hated by Leo, and the 
Covenanters by Claverhouse. 

' For a graphic and not very favourable account of the Wahhabee 
Empire, as it exists now in Arabia and its seat of Govermnent at Riad, 
see Palgrave's 'Arabia,' Chap. IX. -XIII. There are one or two 
passages in this account, e.g., Vol. I. 365-373 ; 427-437, in which I 
cannot but think, with all my admiration for Mr. Palgrave's varied 
powers, that he has not been, even on his own showing elsewhere, 
altogether fair to Islam as a system. 



2i8 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

The extraordinary phenomena attending the great 
religious movement called Babyism now going on in 
Persia, the ecstatic martyrdoms and the prodigality 
of tortures submitted to amidst songs of triumph by 
women and children, the followers of the ' Bab,' are 
well worth the study of all who are interested in the 
history of religion ; and, however we explain the 
facts, much that I have said of Wahhabeeism may, 
fjiittatis iniLtandis, be said of it ; and at all events its 
•existence is a standing proof that Persian Moham- 
medanism possesses so much of vitality as is necessary 
to adapt an old creed to a new belief.' 

When I first wrote the above paragraphs on the 
power of revival which I conceive to be inherent in 
Islam, I did not know that my words were at that 
very time being illustrated in the most striking way, 
not only in India and Persia and Arabia upon which 
I then dwelt, but also throughout the Asiatic domi- 
nions of the Ottoman Sultans. Since then Mr. Pal- 
grave's most interesting * Essays on Eastern Questions * 
have come into my hands ; and I find in them both 
evidence to show that there is such a revival, and a 
graphic account of its leading symptoms. 

Secular and denominational schools are everywhere 
■giving place to schools of the most strictly Mussulman 

^ See Gobineau, ' Les Religions et les Philosophies dans I'Asie 
Cientrale,' p. 141-215. 



THE OTTOMAN SUPREMACY 219 

type. Mosques which were deserted are now crowded 
with worshippers ; mosques which were in ruins are 
rebuilt There is a general reaction, not perhaps to 
be wondered at, against the employment in public 
offices of the European and the Christian. Wine and 
spirit shops are closed, for their trade is gone except 
among the Levantine residents. Even opium and 
tobacco are becoming luxuries which are not only 
forbidden, but also forsaken. 

Add to this, what Mr. Palgrave has also shown, 
that a new nation is as it were growing up under our 
eyes in Eastern Anatolia, rich with all the elements 
of a vigorous national and religious life ; and we shall 
then have reason to believe that though the Ottoman 
supremacy may pass away, as Kaliphs and Sultans, 
Attabeks and Khans, Padishahs and Moguls, have 
passed away before them,'yet Islam itself is a thing of 
indestructible vitality, and may thrive the more when 
rid of the magnificent corruptions and the illusor}^ 
prestige of the Stamboul successors of the Prophet./ 
In truth, Islam has existed for centuries in spite of 
Osmanlee rule, and not because of- it ; and this the 
ambassadors lately sent to the Porte from the most 
distant parts of the Mussulman world — from Bokhara 
and Khokand, from the Sultan of Atchin and the 
Sultan of the Panthays — must have learnt to their 
cost, when they found that the so-called Commander 



220 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

of the Faithful was sufficiently employed nearer home, 
and had neither the power nor the will to give them 
the help or even the advice they asked. 

/ Mohammedanism, therefore, can still renew its 
youth, and it is possible that the present generation, in 
face of the advance of semi-barbarous and intolerant 
Russia, may see a revival of the old Crusading spirit — 
an outburst of stern fanaticism, which, armed with the 
courage of despair, obliterating, as in the Circassian 
war,^ even the immemorial schism of Sonnee and 
Sheeah, may hurl once more the united strength of the 
Crescent upon the vanguard of advancing Christendom. 
It is a prospect formidable to every Christian Power — 
formidable above all to those who for good or for evil 
rule thirty millions of Mussulmans in India ; but I 
cannot think, even if the result were to be that a 
stop should be put to all further conquests of Euro- 
peans in the East, that the world would be altogether 
a loser thereby. / In the East a revived Islam contains 
more elements of hope for the future than a corrupt 



^ See Baron Von Haxthausen's ' Tribes of the Caucasus ; ' especially 
his interesting account of the rise of Muridism, and the heroic stntggle 
of Schamyl, his personal influence, and his genius for military and 
political organisation. Truly while Mohammedanism can throw off 
geniuses like Schamyl, it may well be able to dispense with such govern- 
ments as that of the Turks. The Baron's prophecies of a general 
collapse of Mohammedanism are being signally falsified. The union of 
Sonnees and Sheeahs was one principle of Muridism as taught by 
Moollah Mohammed, and after him by Schamyl. 



LIMITS TO INFLUENCE OF EAST ON WEST 221 

Christianity— and Christianity in Asia has rarely been 
otherwise than dead ; ^ and the religious enthusiasm of 
some new Commander of the Faithful, of some heroic 
Schamyl or Abdel Kader on a vaster scale, than the 
dull, heavy tread of military despotism beneath the 
shadow of the Czars of all the Russias. 

And here, perhaps, ^vill be the place to make 
a few remarks upon a subject which cannot have 
failed to attract the attention of the more thoughtful 
among us in recent years — I mean the attempt made 
to introduce Western manners and customs into 
Eastern countries. 

We live in days when we hear of Khans and 
Khedives, Shahs and Sultans, giving up their imme- 
morial passivity and seclusion, and even coming to 
Europe with the avow^ed intention of carrying back to 
Asia what they can of Western science and civilisa- 
tion. I should be slow indeed to complain of any 
steps taken by the Western Powers to do away with 
any institutions which, like the Suttee, the festivals of 

' For the marked superiority, for instance, of the tribes of the Cau- 
casus which are Mohammedan, to those which are nominally Christian, 
see Freshfield's 'Caucasus,' p. 454-457: 'In the Caucasus the tra- 
veller will be compelled to contrast the truthfulness, industiy, and 
courteous hospitality of the Mohammedans north of the chain with the 
lying indolence and churlishness of the Christians in the south ; ' and 
for the general subject of Oriental Christianity as it is found in Ar- 
menia, Georgia, Syria, Egj'pt, &c., see Palgrave's essay entitled 'Eastern 
Christians.' 



222 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Juggernaut, the East African slave trade, or the 
traffic in opium, are a curse to our common humanity, 
or are not grounded on any fundamental peculiarity 
of the Eastern world. But to attempt by force, or 
even by influence brought to bear upon Eastern rulers, 
to do away with any domestic or national institutions, 
such as the form of government, or patriarchal slavery, 
or even polygamy, can do no good. 
/ Eastern despotism is not what Western despotism 
Is, nor is Oriental slavery like American. Nor is even 
polygamy In the East so Intolerable an evil as it 
would be in the social freedom of the West. For 
example, an Eastern sovereign has all the power over 
his subjects that a father had in the most primitive 
times, and had even In Rome, over his children. His 
power is liable to the same abuses ; but it has also 
some of its safeguards and redeeming points. To 
introduce Into his government, as the Shah has been 
supposed to wish, a system of Boards and Parliaments, 
of checks and counter-checks, such as works fairly w^ell 
in this country because It has grown with our growth 
and is suitable to our Instinct of compromise in every- 
thing, would be to make many tyrants Instead of 
one, and to cripple the power and lessen the respon- 
sibility of the only man in Persia whose interest it is 
to let no one commit injustice but himself. Asia, till 
its whole nature be changed, can probably never be 



EASTERN DESPOTISM 223: 

better governed than it was by the early Kaliphs ; 
and if an Abou Bakr or an Omar, or even a Haroun 
or a Mahmoud, a Baber or an Akbar, do not come 
twice in a century, it is probable that Nature has 
endowed Asiatics with precisely those qualities of 
patience, docility, and inertness which harmonise better 
with the evils of such a government than with those of 
any other. , 

Polygamy is a more difficult question, and it is 
impossible, for obvious reasons, to discuss it adequately 
here. It is a gigantic evil, worse even than slavery ; 
for with its attendant mischiefs, so far as it extends, it 
does away with all real sympathy and companion- 
ship between man and woman ; it is unnatural in 
the fullest sense of the word, in a highly civi- 
lised nation, for Nature, by making the number 
of men and women equal, has declared decisively 
for monogamy. But, in a barbarous people, poly- 
gamy has this one redeeming point, that it is less 
likely that any woman will be left without a natural 
protector ; and, as a matter of fact, it is almost 
universally allowed in primitive stages of civilisation.^ 

* In an uncivilised nation split up, as Arabia was before Mohammed, 
into a number of hostile tribes, or ovenam by its more powerful neigh- 
bours, as was Palestine in the time of the Judges, the number of births 
of men and women is no doubt about equal ; but the male population 
is reduced by war to half its proper number ; the preponderance of 
women in such a state of society renders Polygamy possible, and the 
insecurity renders it from that one point of view allowable. Sir Samuel 



.224 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

In the East it is the almost inevitable result of that 
fundamental institution of Eastern, as well as of 
Moslem society, the absolute seclusion of women. 
There is an impervious bar to all social intercourse 
between the sexes before marriage. The husband's 
knowledge of his future wife is at second hand only, 
and rests on the report of a Khatibeh,^ or professional 
match-maker. Such a marriage is more than a 
lottery ; there can be no affection to begin with, and, 
except on rare occasions, it is not likely that it will 
turn out to be really happy. If it be thoroughly 
uncongenial, a man tries his luck once more in the 
same miserable lottery, and for his own happiness, and 
probably also for that of all concerned, annuls the 
previous bond. Hence polygamy implies freedom of 
divorce, and both together are the inevitable result of 
the seclusion of the female sex. But to abolish by 
law the two former without dealing with the far more 
fundamental institution which is its root, would be to 
carry on a war with symptoms only, and to introduce 
■evils worse than those it is wished to prevent. The 
only way of going to the root of the matter would be, 

Baker, in his ' Albert Nyanza,' Introduction, p. 25, remarks that ' In 
all tropical countries Polygamy is the prevailing evil.' He might have 
gone on to say much the same of slavery ; but then what would become 
of the charge he so often makes against Islam — that it is responsible 
for polygamy and slavery ? 

1 Lane's ' Modern Egyptians,' I. 199. 



POLYGAMY 225 

if it were possible, to allow a freer intercourse between 
the sexes at all times ; and Sir William Muir allows 
that this could not be done at all with the present free- 
dom of divorce.^ It is a melancholy fact, but a fact still, 
that the strict checks imposed by Mohammed on mar- 
ried women, degrading though they are,^ are essential 
to prevent what is still worse, and, be it remembered, 
what was far worse before the reforms and limitations 
which Mohammed himself imposed. It is a complete 
dead-lock ; and the greatest reformers, Moses no less 
than Mohammed, have been, unable to deal with the 
root of the evil. It is to be remembered, on the other 
hand, that both Moses and Mohammed did what they 
could to restrain and modify its abuses ; and at present 
neither polygamy nor divorce is so common as is 
often supposed. The humanity of human nature has 
asserted itself; and Lane, the most accurate observer, 
says that polygamy is in Egypt at all events very 
rare among the higher classes, and not common even 
among the lower.^ 

^ Muir, III. 234, and note. 

2 Sura XXXIII. 6 and 56. Also Sura XXIV. 32. 

^ Lane, I. 231 : 'Not more than one husband in twenty has two wives 
at the same time.' But divorce is very common. If it were not for 
Lane's proverbial accuracy, one would be inclined to suspect that in the 
passage referred to in the text he had transposed the words higher and 
lower. Certainly in other parts of the Mohammedan world polygamy 
is, for obvious reasons, much more common among the rich than among 
the poor. But the current of opinion, Ijke the general conditions of 
society, seems to be everywhere setting against it, especially in India. 

Q 



226 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Much the same may be said of slavery. The 
slavery of the East is a patriarchal institution, coeval 
with the very dawn of history. It is an institution 
allowed and modified by Moses, even as it was allowed 
and modified by Mohammed, for people in that stage of 
civilisation which required it. In neither nation has it 
anything in common with slavery as it was in America, 
or slavery as practised at all by civilised nations. 
To do away with it by force, as has been the case in 
Khiva, though we naturally rejoice at it, will probably 
do little permanent good. It will revive in another, 
and probably a worse, shape. Perhaps we have hit 
upon the one possible means of gradually getting rid 
of it, in making it impossible to recruit slavery from 
without by means of the slave trade. Much will 
have to be done henceforward by free labour in 
Arabia, in Persia, and in Egypt, which has hitherto 
been done by slaves ; and we need not fear but that 
the result will be so good, that even in a stolid 
Oriental people the gradual movement will be one 
in the direction of abolition. The foreign slave trade, 
in fact, is, owing to the remonstrances of Dr. Living- 
stone and the expeditions of Sir Samuel Baker and 
Sir Bartle Frere, already, for the time at all events, 
almost at an end, and it is a mistake to suppose that 
it ever received any sanction either from Moses or 
Mohammed. Moses ordered the man-stealer and the 



SLAVERY 227 

man-seller to be put to death, V/ Mohammed is re- 
ported by the ' Sonnah ' to have said, ' The worst of 
men is the seller of men.'^ / 

Western science, with its railways, its canals, and 
its printing-presses, may, no doubt, do something for the 
material prosperity of Eastern countries, but by itself 
it will do little for their moral welfare ; and a thin var- 
nish of Western civilisation introduced by rulers who 
have been forced to admire the material power of the 
West, and have lost their own self-respect in the pro- 
cess, is earnestly to be deprecated. Those Orientals 
who have been most influenced by the Franco-mania 
of Stamboul are, beyond all comparison, the most 
degraded and profligate of their race, and no earnest 
observer can wish to see imported into other parts of 
the Mohammedan world that indescribable combina- 
tion of all that is contemptible in human nature 
conveyed by the word Levantine. 

The heroic and unselfish lives of a few such men 
as Livingstone — alas that it is now all too certain that 
his life is a thing of the past ! — are the only legitimate 

1 Exodus XXI. 16. 

2 The slave trade rests for its support on no religion at all, but only 
on that which is cruel and selfish in human nature. It is no more fair 
to tax Islam, as is often done, with the horrors of the East African 
slave trade, than it would have been in the last century to tax Chris- 
tianity with the still greater horrors of the West African traffic and its 
sequelce in America. It has been remarked with truth that the cruel 
treatment of domesticated slaves is the shameful and exclusive preroga- 
tive of civilisation. 

Q 2 



228 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

means of introducing into semi-civilised countries such 
benefits as we think we have to bestow. A Hfe and 
character Hke Livingstone's has done more to rege- 
nerate the African races than any amount of direct 
preaching, or any number of European settlements ; 
with the miserable and immoral wars that so often 
follow in their train. Such men are the true pioneers 
of civilisation and Christianity, of the only species 
of civilisation and the only form of Christianity which 
we have any reason to expect will be a real benefit 
to the East. 

But does it follow, from what I have said of the 
immobility of the East, that it is impossible for Islam 
to make any advance at all ; that it is impossible for 
it to yield anything to the progressive civilisation of 
Christianity and of the West ? 

How Christianity and civilisation should deal with 
Mohammedanism I have partly indicated already, 
and shall have a very few more words to say upon the 
subject presently. But, first, what can Islam do on its 
part } Where religion and law are indissolubly bound 
up together, as they are in the Koran, each loses, and 
each gains, something. What they gain in stability, 
they more than lose in flexibility. And yet it may 
be safely said that there is nothing more extraordi- 
nary in the whole history of Islam, than the way in 
which the theory of the verbal inspiration of the 



CAN ISLAM PROGRESS? 229 

Koran, and the consequent stereotyped and unalter- 
able nature of its precepts, have, by ingenuity, by 
legal fictions, by the * Sonnah,' or traditional sayings 
of Mohammed, and by respoitsa prtidentum^ been 
accommodated to the changing circumstances and the 
various degrees of civilisation of the nations which 
profess it. When the Kadi fails to find in the law 
laid down for the nomad Arabs a rule precisely appli- 
cable to the more complex requirements of Smyrna 
or of Delhi, he places the sacred volume upon his 
head, and so renders homage to human reason and to 
the law of progress. He does what Puritans and 
Churchmen would alike do well to remember, when 
each professes to find in the varying or convertible 
expressions of the writers of the New Testament a 
divinely ordered and unalterable model of Church 
government.^ It is not, therefore, quite so true as is 
commonly supposed, that Islam is reconcileable with 
one narrow form of government or society only ; and 
it is quite possible that where so much has been done 
already, more may be done in future, and means may 
be found for reconciling, for instance, the laws against 
taking interest for money with the requirements of 
modern society. The intolerant principles of the 

^ Compare Acts XX. 17. . fxereKaXicraro robs Trpea^vrepovs rrjs 
eKKXrjO-ias, with v. 28, vfxas eQero diriffKoirovs. The watchwords of the 
bitterest ecclesiastical jealousy and hatred are in this passage of the New 
Testament seen to be, after ail, synonymous and convertible terms. 



230 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Koran have long since been reconciled, except where 
there is a passing outburst of fanaticism, with the 
utmost practical toleration ; and the standard of the 
'Jihad,' or holy war, will probably never henceforward 
be raised on an extensive scale, except in a war of 
self-defence, and unless the lives and liberties of 
Mohammedans, as well as their religion, are at stake. 
And, what is infinitely more important, it seems 
to me that while Mohammedans cling as strongly as 
ever to their rigid Monotheism, and to their unfaltering 
belief in the Divine mission of their Prophet — and 
what serious person could wish them to do otherwise? 
— to give up those beliefs which have made them 
what they are, which have given them a glorious 
history, and which have influenced half a world ; to 
give up — 

' . . . Those first affections, 
Those shadowy recollections, 

Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain-light of all their day, 
Are yet a master-light of all their seeing ; 

Uphold them— cherish — and have power to make 
Their noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal silence : truths that wake 
To perish never ! ' — 

while they cling, I say, to these as strongly, yes, more 
strongly than ever, they may yet be brought to see that 
there is a distinction between what Mohammed said 
himself, and what others have said for him ; and that 



CAN tr APPROXIMATE TO CHRISTIANITY? 231 

there is a still broader distinction between what he said 
as a legislator and a conqueror, and what he said as a 
simple prophet. ./There are some among them who see 
now, and there will be more who will soon see, that 
there may be an appeal to the Mohammed of Mecca 
from the Mohammed of Medina ; that there may be 
an idolatry of a book, as well as of a picture, or a sta- 
tue, or a shapeless mass of stone ; and that the Prophet, 
who always in other matters asserted his fallibility, 
was never more fallible, though certainly never more 
sincere, than when he claimed an equal infallibility for 
the whole Koran alike./ Finally, with the growth of 
knowledge of the real character of our faith, Moham- 
medans must recognise that the Christ of the Gospel 
was something ineffably above the Christ of those 
Christians from whom alone Mohammed drew his 
notions of Him ; that He was a perfect mirror of that 
one primary attribute of the Eternal of which Moham- 
med could catch only a far-off glance, and which, had 
it been shown to him as it really was, must needs have 
taken possession of his soul. 

All this may or may not be in our own time ; but 
in a sympathetic study even of Mohammedanism as 
it is, Christians have not a little to gain. There is the 
protest against Polytheism in all its shapes ; there is 
the absolute equality of man before God ; there is the 
sense of the dignity of human nature ; there is the 



232 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

simplicity of life, the vivid belief in God's providence, 
the entire submission to His will ; and last, not least, 
there is the courage of their convictions, the fearless 
avowal before men of their belief in God, and their^ 
pride in its possession as the one thing needful. There 
is in the lives of average Mohammedans, from what- 
ever causes, less of self-indulgence, less of the mad 
race for wealth, less of servility, than is to be found 
in the lives of average Christians. Truly we may 
think that these things ought not so to be ; and if Chris- 
tians generally were as ready to confess Christ, and to 
be proud of being His servants, as Mohammedans are 
of being followers of Mohammed, one chief obstacle to 
the spread of Christianity would be removed. And 
the two great religions which started from kindred 
soil, the one from Mecca, the other from Jerusalem, 
might work on in their respective spheres — the one the 
religion of progress, the other of stability ; the one of 
a complex life, the other of a simple life ; the one 
dwelling more upon the inherent weakness of humian 
nature, the other on its inherent dignity ; ' the one the 
religion of the best parts of Asia and Africa, the other 
of Europe and America — each rejoicing in the success 
of the other, each supplying the other's wants in a 
generous rivalry for the common good of humanity. 

> Perhaps Ihe two views are, after all, only different aspects of the 
same truth. 



WHAT CAN CHRISTIANS lEARN FROM 2SLAM? 233 

A few words more about Mohammed himself, and 
I have done. The world, in its wisdom or unwisdom, 
has never thought proper to distinguish Mohammed 
from the milhons of Mohammeds named after him, 
by calling him 'the Great.' Perhaps he was too 
great for such an external distinction. People call 
the conqueror of Constantinople, eight centuries later, 
Mohammed the Second. But I do not think they 
ever speak of the Prophet as Mohammed the First ; 
and perhaps the unconscious homage thus rendered 
to him by a world which ostensibly, and till very 
lately, has done him such scant justice, is the 
highest tribute that can be given to his greatness. 
The Greeks paid the highest compliment they could 
to the surpassing splendour of the King of Persia 
when, consciously or unconsciously, they dropped the 
article before his name, and so put him on a level, 
grammatical and moral, with the sun, the moon, and 
the earth, which could by no possibility need any 
such distinguishing mark. Compare Mohammed with 
the long roll of men whom the world by common 
consent has called ' Great ; ' while I admit that there 
is no one point in his character in which he is not 
surpassed by one or other, take him all in all, what he 
was, and what he did, and what those inspired by him 
have done, he seems to me to stand alone, above and 
beyond them all. A distinguished writer on the Holy 



234 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

Roman Empire has remarked of Charles the Great 
that, ' hke all the foremost men of our race, he was 
all great things in one.' ' But though Mr. Bryce 
does not illustrate the truth of his remark by Moham- 
med — nay, by not including him among the foremost 
men of the world whom he goes on to enumerate, he 
seems designedly to exclude him — I venture to think 
that of no one of them all is the remark more strictly 
true. 

Mohammed did not, indeed, himself conquer a 
world like Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon. He 
did not himself weld together into a homogeneous 
whole a vast system of states like Charles the Great. 
He was not a philosophic king like Marcus Aure- 
lius ; nor a philosopher like Aristotle or like Bacon, 
ruling by pure reason the world of thought for cen- 
turies with a more than kingly power ; he was not 
a legislator for all mankind, nor even the highest 
part of it, like Justinian ; nor did he cheaply earn the 
title of ' the Great ' by being the first among rulers to 
turn, like Constantine, from the setting to the rising 
sun. He was not a universal philanthropist, like the 
greatest of the Stoics, 

' Non sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo ;' 

nor was he the apostle of the highest form of reli- 

' Bryce's ' Holy Roman Empire,' p. 73. 



CHARACTER OF MOHAMMED 235 

gion and civilisation combined, like Gregory or Boni- 
face, like Leo or Alfred the Great. He was less, in- 
deed, than most of these in one or two of the elements 
that go to make up human greatness, but he was also 
greater. Half Christian and half Pagan, half civilised 
and half barbarian, it was given to him in a marvel- 
lous degree to unite the peculiar excellences of the 
one with the peculiar excellences of the other. ' I 
have seen,' said the ambassador sent by the trium- 
phant Koreishites to the despised exile at Medina ; 
' I have seen the Persian Chosroes and the Greek 
Heraclius sitting upon their thrones, but never did I 
see a man ruling his equals as does Mohammed.' 

Head of the State as well as of the Church, he was 
Caesar and Pope in one ; but he was Pope without the 
Pope's pretensions, and Caesar without the legions of 
Caesar. Without a standing army, without a body- 
guard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue, if ever 
any man had the right to say that he ruled by a right 
Divine, it was Mohammed ; for he had all the power 
without its instruments and without its supports. He 
rose superior to the titles and ceremonies, the solemn 
trifling, and the proud humility of court etiquette. To 
hereditary kings, to princes born in the purple, these 
things are, naturally enough, as the breath of life ; but 
those who ought to have known better, even self-made 
rulers, and those the foremost in the files of time — a 



2^,6 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 



■J 



C^sar, a Cromwell, a Napoleon — have been unable to 
resist their tinsel attractions. Mohammed was con- 
tent with the reality, he cared not for the dressings, of 
power. ^ The simplicity of his private life was in keep- 
ing with his public life. * God,' says Al Bokhari, 
' offered him the keys of the treasures of the earth, 
but he would not accept them.' 

Hagiology is not history ; but the contemporaries 
of Mohammed, his enemies who rejected his mission, 
with one voice extol his piety, his justice, his vera- 
city, his clemency, his humility, and that at a time 
before any imaginary sanctity could have enveloped 
him. A Christian even, as is remarked by a great 
writer whom I have quoted above, with his more per- 
fect code of morality before him, must admit that 
Mohammed, with very rare exceptions, practised all 
the moral virtues but one ; and in that one, as I have 
shown, he was in advance of his time and nation. 

Assuredly, if Christian missionaries are ever to win 
over Mohammedans to Christianity, they must alter 
their tactics. It will not be by discrediting the great 
Arabian Prophet, nor by throwing doubts upon his 
mission, but by paying him that homage which is his 
due ; by pointing out, not how Mohammedanism 
differs from Christianity, but how it resembles it ; by 
dwelling less on the dogmas of Christianity, and more 

1 See ' British Quarterly Review,' Jan. 1872, p. 128. 



CAN CHRISTIANS INFLUJiNCE MUSSALMANSl 237 

on its morality ; by showing how perfectly that 
Christ, whom Mohammed with his half-knowledge so 
reverenced, came up to the ideal which prophets and 
kings desired to see, and had not seen, and which 
Mohammed himself, Prophet and King in one, could 
only half realise. In this way, and in this alone, is it 
likely that Christianity can ever act upon Moham- 
medanism ; not by sweeping it into oblivion — for w^hat 
of truth there is in it, and there is very much truth, 
can never die — but by gradually, and perhaps un- 
consciously, breathing into its vast and still vigorous 
frame a newer, a purer, and a diviner life. 
/ By a fortune absolutely unique in history, Mo- 
hammed is a threefold founder — * of a nation, of an 
empire, and of a religion.' Illiterate himself, scarcely 
able to read or write, he was yet the author of a 
book which is a poem, a code of laws, a Book of 
Common Prayer, and a Bible in one, and is rever- 
enced to this day by a sixth of the whole human 
race as a miracle of purity of style, of wisdom, and of 
truth. It was the one miracle claimed by Moham- 
med — his ' standing miracle' he called it ; and a miracle 
indeed it is. But looking at the circumstances of the 
time, at the unbounded reverence of his followers, and 
comparing him with the Fathers of the Church or 
with mediaeval saints, to my mind the most miraculous 
thing about Mohammed is, that he never claimed the 



238 MOHAMMED AND MOHAMMEDANISM 

power of working miracles. Whatever he had said he 
could do, his disciples would straightway have seen him 
do. They could not help attributing to him miraculous 
acts which he never did, and which he always denied 
he could do. What more crowning proof of his sin- 
cerity is needed .'' Mohammed to the end of his life 
claimed for himself that title only with which he had 
begun, and which the highest philosophy and the truest 
Christianity will one day, I venture to believe, agree 
in yielding to him — that of a Prophet, a very Prophet 
of God.' 

The religion, indeed, that he taught is below the 
purest form of our own as the central figure of the 
Mohammedan religion is below the central figure of 
the Christian — a difference vast and incommensurable ; 
but, in my opinion, he comes next to Him in the long 
roll of the great benefactors of the human race ; next 
to Him, longo intervallo certainly, but still next. He 
had faults, and great ones, which he was always the 
first himself, according to his light, to confess and to 
deplore ; and the best homage we can render to the 
noble sincerity of his character is to state them, as I 
hope I have tried to do, exactly as they were. ' It 
was the fashion of old,' to quote once more the words 
of our greatest novelist and greatest psychologist — 
and so to conclude this course of Lectures, of the 
manifold imperfections and shortcomings of which 



MOHAMMED A TRUE PROPHET 239 

no one of those who have so kindly listened to me 
week after week can be half so conscious as myself 
— ' It was the fashion of old, when an ox was 
led out for sacrifice to Jupiter, to chalk the dark 
spots, and give the offering a false show of un- 
blemished whiteness. Let us fling away the chalk, 
and boldly say — the victim is . spotted, but it is 
not therefore in vain that his mighty heart is laid on 
the altar of men's highest hopes.' 



APPENDICES. 



APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 



Sir Bartle Frere, in an interesting and able and catholic 
essay in * The Church and the Age ' on Indian Missions, takes 
a hopeful view of the future of India, as influenced by Western 
civilisation and Christianity. He begins (p. 318) by showing, 
rightly enough, that almost everything we do in India tends 
to break up old beliefs, and so to prepare the way for a new 
one, and is, therefore, more or less Missionary work ; ' not 
only railways and printing-presses, education, commerce, and 
the electric telegraph; our impartial codes and uniform 
system of administration; but our misfortunes and our 
mistakes, our wars, our famines, and our mutinies.' He 
then gives (p. 334-337) elaborate statistics of the Missionary 
agencies at work in 1865 in Western India; they have 
enormously increased in the last 30 years, and he estimates 
the number of Missionaries at work at about 105, and the 
number of converts at somewhere about 2,200; and this, 
multiplied by six or seven, would probably, he thinks, give 
a general idea of the direct results of Missionary work 
during that period throughout all India (I would remark 
here that an official statement published in 1873 gives a 
much more favourable account, estimating the number 

R 



242 APPENDICES 

of communicants at 78,494); but when Sir Bartle Frere comes 
to deal with Mohammedanism (p. 354-356) he gives no 
statistics on the point we most desiderate — the number of 
converts, if it be at all appreciable, from Islam to Christi- 
anity ; the general remarks, indeed, he does make, seem to 
me to go exactly contrary to the conclusions he draws from 
them — e.g.^ Mohammedans study portions of the Bible more 
than they did formerly; but these portions unfortunately 
seem to be the prophetical writings, especially those of 
Daniel ; and they find therein the denunciations of Chris- 
tianity which Christians find in it against other creeds ; they 
are humiliated by the fact that Mohammedanism is no longer 
the imperial creed of India ; but the upshot of their depres- 
sion is not Christianity^ but Wahhabeeism, i.e.^ a return 
to Islam in its simplest and sternest shape. Brahmoism, 
which is really Brahmanism as modified by Christianity, 
Brahmanism minus caste and minus idolatr}-- of every kind, 
seems to be in some respects the beginning of a national 
movement, and, judging from the authoritative sermon 
(p. 346-352) delivered in Calcutta on the 39th anniversary 
of the Brahma Samaj, and entitled ' The Future Church,' 
seems to me to give real hope for the future, and to be very 
suggestive as to the way in which Missionaries should go to 
work. * The answer,' says the preacher, ' of Jesus the 
immortal Son of God, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy 
soul, and with all thy strength, and thy neighbour as thyself, 
is the essence of true religion simply and exhaustively 
expounded.' ' The composite faith of the future Church is 
to combine in perfect harmony the profound devotion of 
the Hindoo and the heroic enthusiasm of the Mussulman ; ' 



APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 243 

but, unfortunately, the simplicity and intelligibility of the 
Mohammedan creed render it incapable at present of 
actually coalescing with the eclectic spirit of Brahmoism. It 
is strange at first sight that Mohammedanism, originally the 
most eclectic of religions, should, in India at all events, 
prove itself to be the least capable of settling down on 
terms of equality with other creeds, or of combining with 
them. No doubt the fact that Mohammedanism has been 
the Imperial creed and is so no longer, and the proud 
memories of Mahmoud and Akbar, of Baber and of 
Aurungzebe, are a formidable, though it is to be hoped a 
passing, difficulty. If the Mohammedan revival now going 
on in India under the influence of the Wahhabees, the 
Firazees, and the followers of Dudu Miyan, can only be 
accompanied by a great moral reformation, such as 
Sprenger himself does not seem to despair of (L, p. 
459, 'the Arabs only want another Luther'), the result, par- 
tially at least, of Christian influences, the simplicity of Islam 
will no doubt in its turn give it a great advantage over the 
Brahma Samaj in the struggle to fill the void created by the 
crumbling fabric of Hindooism. It has another great 
advantage in being already to some extent in possession of 
the ground. I observe that one of the speakers at the 
recent Allahabad Missionary Conference says that thirty 
millions, the estimated number of Mussulmans in India, is 
much below the mark. 

The unfavourable opinion expressed by Dr. Livingstone 
on the effects of Mohammedanism in Africa (Expedition to 
the Zambesi, p. 513-516, and 602-603) appears opposed to 
the general view I have taken in the Lecture ; and of course, 
so far as his personal experience goes, is unimpeachable and 

R 2 



244 APPENDICES 

conclusive. But it is clear that Dr. Livingstone drew his 
general conclusions almost entirely from his acquaintance 
with the Arab slave traders in the south and east of Africa, 
whom it was the main purpose of his noble and heroic life 
to put down. In the Lecture I have purposely not dwelt 
upon the extension of Islam along the coast to the south of 
the Equator, for the simple reason that the inhabitants are 
Mohammedans in nothing but the name. The Arabs there 
are of the most degraded type, and are engaged almost to a 
man in the brutalising slave trade, which by itself is a com- 
plete obstacle to every species of civilisation and religion. 
No doubt, as Dr. Livingstone remarks, the native African 
there contrasts favourably with the Mohammedan — as favour- 
ably, I would add, as he does even with the Portuguese ; 
but tli^t Dr. Livingstone judged of the whole of Moham- 
medan Africa by his experience of its worst part, is clear 
from his remark — opposed as it is to the unanimous 
testimony of travellers in Northern and Central Africa — 
' that the only foundation for the statements respecting the 
spread of Islam in Africa is the fact that in a remote 
corner of North-West Africa, the Foulahs and Mandingoes, 
and some other tribes in Northern Africa, have made con- 
quests of territory ; but that even they care so little for the 
extension of their faith, that after conquest no pains whatever 
are taken to indoctrinate the adults of the tribe' (p. 513). 
Captain Burton asserts that ' Mohammedans alone make 
proselytes in Africa.' Dr. Livingstone says as explicitly ' in 
Africa the followers of Christ alone are anxious to propagate 
their faith.' Here is a direct contradiction ; and it is obvious 
that in a country of such vast extent as Africa no such sweep- 
ing statement can be absolutely true. Perhaps Sierra Leone, 



APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 245 

to which Dr. Livingstone paid a visit for the purpose of testing 
the results of missionary enterprise, and to which he specially 
refers (p. dd'^^ will furnish us with the best materials for 
pointing out how far the two statements are reconcileable 
with each other, and with substantial accuracy. In Sierra 
Leone there is a large negro community, the members of 
which having been brought for many years into contact not 
only with direct Christian preaching, but, what is more 
important, with Christian education, government, and 
example, are both excellent citizens and sincere Christians, 
and, as one would expect, contrast favourably in point of 
morality even with the best Mohammedans. This is un- 
questionably true ; and of the self-denying efforts of the 
missionaries, especially the native ones, within certain 
limits, it is impossible to speak too highly. As to the exact 
number of Christians in the colony at this moment it is 
rather difficult to arrive at an accurate conclusion ; but to 
take Dr. Livingstone's figures, he remarks (p. 605) that in 
the census of 1861 the whole population of Sierra Leone 
itself was 41,000 souls, 27,000 of them being Christian, and 
1,774 Mohammedan, 'not a very large proportion,' he 
observes, ' for the only sect in Africa which makes proselytes.' 
It is not a large proportion, but what is the number now ? 
Sierra Leone now affords the most striking proof that can be 
given of the extent to which on the one hand Islam is 
spreading in that part of Africa by the efforts of unassisted 
missionaries, and on the other of the absence of any such 
propagation of the Christian faith among the tribes beyond 
the limits of the settlement. When Dr. Livingstone visited 
Sierra Leone a few years ago, Islam was, as he says, hardly 
known there ; since then Mohammedan missionaries have 



246 APPENDICES 

come thither from the Foulahs and from the far interior, 
and with what result ? No one will say that it is the sword 
to which they owe their success, for the peace of Sierra 
Leone has been for years undisturbed. And now we have 
(Government Report of West African Colonies, 1873) the 
testimony of Mr. Johnson (p. 15), the able and excellent 
missionary whom I have quoted in my Lecture, endorsed as 
it would seem by the Bishop of the Diocese, that the 
Christian community at Sierra Leone, however flourishing 
itself, has exercised no influence on the large number of 
native Africans resorting annually to the town for the pur- 
pose of trade, and still less has it done anything to propagate 
itself by sending out missionaries among adjoining tribes. 
On the other hand, a few active and zealous Mohammedan 
missionaries have carried their peaceful war into the 
enemies' country, and have produced great results even 
among the Christian and native population of Sierra Leone 
itself; insomuch that the religion of a large portion, the 
Governor says of the majority, of the Christians within the 
settlement has been actually changed by their preaching ! 
There may be, and it is to be hoped there is, exaggeration 
as to the numbers ; but there can be no doubt, looking to 
the coftsensus of testimony, that Islam is propagated in 
Western, Northern, and Central Africa ; that it is propagated 
by simple preaching and with marked success even where a 
Christian Government, and, what is better, Christianity itself, 
is to a great extent in possession of the ground. One wishes 
that Dr. Livingstone, the greatest and most single-minded 
of all the friends of Africa, had himself come into contact 
with a few of these simple and single-minded Mohammedan 
missionaries. They come so near in many respects to his 



APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. 247 

own ideal of what a Christian missionary ought to be, that 
one feels sure he would have been led to modify his judg- 
ment as to the system which produces them, and to the 
great teacher whom he rarely mentions but as the 'false 
prophet.' 

The remarks I have made in the Lecture as to the atti- 
tude which it seems to me that Christian Missionaries should 
adopt, wherever their efforts appear to have a chance of 
being successful — and surely there is too much evil in the 
world that is remediable, to allow of a great expenditure of 
labour or money where there is no such prospect — have been 
suggested to me mainly by way of contrast to what I have 
read in most books devoted to the cause of Missions. Even 
so noble, and self-sacrificing, and single-hearted a man as 
Henry Martyn appears to have gone out as a missionary to 
India, nay to have argued with Mohammedans, without 
having first read a word of the Koran, even in its English 
dress (Memoir of Rev. Henry Martyn, by Rev. J. Sargent, 
p. 177 : cf. 225 ) ; and throughout his career he treats it as an 
' imposture ; ' ' the work of the devil.' He is sent to fight 
'the four faced-devil of India,' — i.e. Hindoos, Mohammedans, 
Papists, and Infidels (p. 259) ; and see a summary of his 
written argumxents against Mohammedans (on p. 335), which 
are quite enough by themselves to account for his ill success. 
See also the account by another devoted missionary, the Rev. 
C. B. Leupolt, of his mission at Benares (' Recollections of 
an Indian Missionary '), who takes much the same position. 
' The so-called Prophet of the Mohammedans ;' ' the Koran 
is an assemblage of facts and passages taken from the Bible 
mixed with a great number of gross and cunningly devised 
fables / ' no Mohammedan who believes the whole Koran 



248 APPENDICES 

can have the notion of the true God ;' ' the Koran is cal- 
culated to lead man daily further from God, and to unite him 
closer to the Prince of darkness ;' ' Satan holds them 
enthralled by a false religion,' and so on. How not to deal 
with a different faith could hardly be better demonstrated 
than by the writings of two such admirable and devoted men. 
Surely the system has been to blame ! Happily, as is shown 
from the general tone of the Allahabad Conference, and the 
explicit testimony of the Government of India in 1873, there 
has been a great advance in the right direction lately. Not to 
go beyond the limited circle of one's own acquaintance, such 
men as Bishop Cotton ; the Rev. George and the Rev. Arthur 
Moule, now in China; and the Rev. James Johnson, native 
of Sierra Leone ^ — though I would not venture to say that 
they would in any degree accept my point of view — yet in 
reality would have much in common with it ; and all would 
certainly admit the immense amount of good that is to be 
found in the creeds, which it is their duty to controvert. 
Alas, that those who knew Bishop Cotton well, and who 
therefore know what his catholic spirit might have done 
for India, can only now, when they think of him, repeat 
to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, the touching 
lament, 

' But oh for a touch of the vanished hand, 
And a sound of the voice that is still ! ' 



APPENDIX TO LECTURE IIL 



That the assertions I have made in the third lecture, as to 
the comparative ferocity of Christian and MussiUman 
religious wars, are within the mark, it would be easy to 
bring abundance of proof. I will adduce here one illustra- 
tion only, drawn from the chief battle-ground of the con- 
tending forces, the Holy Land. Jerusalem capitulated to 
Omar, the third Kaliph, after a protracted blockade in the 
year 637. No property was destroyed except in the in- 
evitable operations of the siege, and not a drop of blood was 
shed except on the field of battle. Omar entered the city 
with the Patriarch, conversing amicably about its history ; at 
the hour of prayer he was invited by the Patriarch to worship 
in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but he refused to do so 
for fear that his descendants might claim a siriiilar right, and 
so the freedom of religious worship, which he wished to secure 
to the inhabitants by the articles of capitulation, might be 
endangered. In the year 1099 the Holy City fell before the 
arms of the Crusaders after a much shorter siege. It was 
taken by storm, and for three days there was an indiscriminate 
slaughter of men, women, and children; 70,000 Mussulmans 
were put to the sword, 10,000 of them in the mosque of 
Omar itself : ' in eodevi te?nplo decern millia decollata sunt ; 

S 



250 APPENDICES 

pediies nostri bisque ad bases cruore pej'emptoriim tingehantur^ 
nee feminis iiec pai'vulis peperccriintJ This comes not from 
an enemy but from the monkish historian, an eyewitness and 
a partaker of what he relates, Foulcher of Chartres. Ray- 
mond of Agiles and Daimbert, Archbishop of Pisa, give simi- 
lar details, and all with approval. The city itself was 
pillaged ; but the turn of the Saracens came once more in 
the year 1187. The breach was already forced, when the 
great Saladin retracted a hasty vow he had made to avenge 
the innocent blood that had been shed when the city had 
been sacked by the Crusaders, and took not Godfrey de 
Bouillon but Omar for his model. No blood was shed, and 
the captives were allowed to ransom themselves, the Frankish 
Christians leaving the city, the Eastern Christians continuing 
to reside there in peace. 

As to humanity in war in general, the progress made has 
not been so great as is commonly supposed, even among 
those who pride themselves, and who to some extent 
pride themselves with reason, on being the pioneers 
of Christianity and civilisation. Take the case of Africa. 
I am not aware that the Saracens in the full career of 
conquest deliberately burnt a single city in the whole of the 
North of Africa, whether as a precautionary measure, or to 
support their prestige, or to glut their revenge. Can England 
say the same ? If we assume — a large assumption — that the 
war on the Gold Coast in 1874 is wholly justifiable, if we 
also assume that the burning of the enemy's capital was 
indeed a necessity, it w^as a necessity for which a Christian 
nation should go into mourning, and should contemplate not 
with feelings of triumph, but with those of humiliation and 
regret. Is there anything of the kind, or has one single 



APPENDIX TO LECTURE III. 251 

ruler either in Church or State — now that the elections are 
over, and the moral iniquity of the war has been condoned 
by its success — been heard to raise his voice in condem- 
nation of it, as even Omar or Saladin might have done ? It 
is difficult to see how the English nation, which has abolished 
the slave trade in the West of Africa, and is, in its best 
portions, profoundly philanthropic, can honestly believe 
that they are advancing the objects they have at heart when, 
in support of such a treaty as I have alluded to in the 
lecture, they lead on a weaker barbarous nation, whom pro 
hac vice we designate as ' our allies,' against a more powerful 
one, and deliberately burn out of their homes a people who, 
barbarous and cruel as they were, have offended us not by 
their cruelty, or by their human sacrifices, but by their honest 
belief that we had come to Africa to bar them from access to 
their own coast. It seems not to have occurred to anyone 
that our * prestige ' would have been sufficiently vindicated, 
and our future security sufficiently provided for, if we 
had burned down the palace of the king, the chief offender. 
But our ' prestige ' serves as an ample excuse for committing 
what we should condemn as crimes in any other nation. It 
is an entity that has juggled us into the belief that to destroy 
what we cannot retain and cannot use is the prerogative, 
not of barbarism, but of civilisation and of Christianity. 
Had the war upon the Gold Coast been avowedly a war 
not for the spread of our influence, or for the security of 
a territory acquired by questionable means, but a moral 
crusade against human sacrifice, or for any purely unselfish 
object, the case would have been different. Truly this war 
will be a damnosa hereditas to posterity, alike whether we 
accept or disclaim the fearful responsibihties in which it 
has involved us. 



252 APPENDICES 

There is an anecdote related of Mahmoud the Ghaznevide, 
the great Turkish conqueror of Central Asia, which seems 
to me to be suggestive. Soon after the conquest of Persia, 
a caravan was cut off by robbers in one of its deserts, and 
the mother of one of the merchants who was killed went 
to Ghazni to complain. Mahmoud urged the impossi- 
bility of keeping order in so remote a part of his terri- 
tories, when the woman boldly answered : ' Why, then, do 
you take countries which you cannot govern, and for the 
protection of which you must answer in the Day of Judg- 
ment ? ' Mahmoud was struck with the reproach ; whether 
it would have prevented all further conquests on his part 
we do not know, for he died soon*after\vards ; but he liberally 
rewarded the woman, and took immediate and effectual steps 
for the protection of the caravans. 



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